CENTRE POINT
War reporting can activate the viewer but it can also titillate his appetite for grief pornography
SIMON JENKINS
The reply from one of the BBC's myriad executives was intriguing. He swore that they showed enough blood, guts and images of slaughtered women and children to gladden the heart of any sadist. What they were doing was 'holding something in reserve' in case something happened that was even more appalling than Yugoslavia. This meant not showing bits of bodies every day, only some days. 'We have to use vio- lence as a kind of television grammar,' said the spokesman, parodying tabloid media- speak. Bell's pictures were great, in other words, but they were still two genocides short of Armageddon. Or as Michael Frayn once wrote, it takes a lot of dead Chinese to make the front page.
I yield to none in my admiration for Bell's reporting. He is good at his job. Some may feel he overdoes the glamour. Night after night I have watched his agitat- ed features on my screen and thought of the day when reporters struggled to tell the news, not their own gloomy spin on it, and when a photographer pointed his camera at a news story, not at a reporter. When Bell demands that the outside world 'do some- thing to stop the slaughter', as in his cele- brated Panorama, he does so with the authority of an American anchorman call- ing in an airstrike. Like most war corre- spondents, he is a passionate believer in intervention, in troops, bombs, missiles, strong deterring weak, .right disciplining wrong, moral imperialists holding military sway across the globe. Such reporters inevitably become advocates not just of a cause — in this case plucky little Bosnia but of a story. Like all of us, they want their theatre of action to top the news.
My professional sympathy goes to the diplomatic correspondents. They have no bangs to peddle, no blood to sell. Their pic- tures are of men in suits getting out of limousines, walking past flagpoles and wav- ing. The camera's chief excitement is whether the driver gets out fast enough to open the rear door. Peace makes poor footage. As for the thousands of unfilmed victims of slaughter — Azeris, Armenians, Afghans and Algerians (to list only the As) — they are too costly to reach. Journalism's humanitarian concern stretches only as far as expense accounts permit.
What is significant in Bell's complaint is his clear message that editorial decisions such as these matter beyond the pure pub- licity appeal of newsgathering. Images of violence affect public attitudes to a conflict, and attitudes guide policy. There is no dodging it. Every media organisation makes judgments nightly on how much to show. This applies not just to war pictures, but to such sensational and revolting mate- rial as that supplied by the West trial. The instinct of most editors is to go as far down the road with Bell as decency allows, to show every drop of gore, every limb, corpse and dying gasp. The reason is that nothing sells like horror.
Television's crimescarer programmes are thus more popular the closer they can be made to real life. They usually include a sav- age attack on a female. The intention is not just to have the viewer glued to the screen with fear. It is to have him, and especially her, nervous of leaving the set and venturing into the street, terrified of her fellows, alien- ated from her community, dependent on the Ali I can hear are nuclear explosions,' lovable, comforting, stay-at-home box. That is what the programme-maker wants, how- ever subconsciously.
Bell's premise is no different, though his motive is perhaps more noble. He wishes the public to respond to the violent images which he claims his editors are censoring from his reports. He says they are sanitising war, falsifying and glamorising it. I might as well say that he is exploiting war to titillate the public's appetite for grief pornography. Either way, he shares with crimescarers, tabloid editors and violent movie-makers a belief in the evocative power of violence on television. It can shape action. An image of sufficient savagery will lift the viewer off the seat, moving him from passive to active mode. It will make him angry and demand that governments intervene to 'do some- thing'. Bell tells us that the world is not just a foul and violent place but that it is our job to stop it being so.
I do not live in Sarajevo and vigorously deny any sovereignty over it. No television reporter tugging at my heartstrings or wrenching at my guts is going to persuade me otherwise. There is no 'correct' ratio of on-screen violence to non-violence, of guns to blood, of reporting to comment, though there must be a limit to what viewers will watch before turning off their sets and throwing up. But I fear that Bell is alarming- ly right in his belief in the power of horrific images to change politicians' minds. Televi- sion helped drive the Americans into Beirut and Somalia and are now driving them into Bosnia. If I spent my every evening counting dismembered corpses from all the corners of the globe, I might indeed soon want every available soldier in perpetual motion, trying to police every slaughter that can be got into my living-room.
I resist this inducement. We have woes enough at home to lead the news. The mis- fortune of the domestic agenda is to lack the photogenic horror of Sarajevo. On Bell's argument, the unemployed of Easter- houses, Meadowell or Moss Side would be better engaged in blasting each other with mortars or disembowelling each other with bayonets. That is the way to get his spon- sorship and that of the Nine O'Clock News. It takes violence to activate the democratic soul. If it did not, Bell and his bosses would not be having their argument. Non-violence has none of the best tunes.
Simon Jenkins writes for the Times.
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