Abstract
A former television journalist calls for urgent debate on whether news channels should air terrorists' atrocities
Eighteen years ago The Independent ran an article I wrote on TV news violence. It focused on the dilemma of how much carnage witnessed by journalists should be aired. At the time I was a London desk journalist with one of the three international television news agencies, serving hundreds of TV channels that selected from our pictures to show to their own viewers.
Part of my job was to “log” incoming satellites. On April 18, 1996 one of our camera crews arrived in Qana, South Lebanon, minutes after a barrage of Israeli shells landed. The swelling numbers of refugees in the UN-run camp meant that when the carpet of bombs rolled there was only room in the air-raid shelters for UN personnel, aid workers, medics and a minority of terrified civilians.
The job of our crews was to rush such pictures to the nearest satellite point and feed them to London, where our technicians recorded them for producers to edit, script and beam out the story on the first available satellite for our client networks across the globe. In between the frantic activity in Lebanon and the fast turnaround in the UK, someone in the London newsroom would tune into a TV monitor, plug in earphones, start a stopwatch and get busy on a keyboard typing an accurate shotlist of the incoming pictures. I logged Qana.
I'd had warning. The newswires were alive with words of horror: people bleeding to death because casualties outnumbered helpers, outraged relatives, weeping soldiers. But after 25 years in mainstream journalism, you almost get used to terrible sights. And you have to log them whether you have become used to them or not.
As a newcomer to TV journalism in 1981, I had been shocked by pictures of troops in El Salvador playing football with the head of a rebel. The 1990s had been no different. Bosnia, Chechnya, Rwanda had provided a regular diet of disgusting death. But this was worse. The Qana crew were there quickly and simply turned their camera on those who had caught the full impact.
I stuck in a VHS. At first it was just smoking ruins of part of the compound, then a heap of dead and dying from enough of a distance to provide professional detachment and the awareness that hundreds of TV stations were going to be getting “good” pictures. Then the crew went in close.
The open-air survivors were so traumatised, and the shelter-seekers emerging into the mid-afternoon nightmare so angry, that they began tearing at the terrible mess in front of them, yelling as they waved a dismembered leg aloft, screaming as they uncovered pieces of a loved one. One man found a baby and held it up. It was in a spotless romper suit, its body and arms completely unmarked. Its chin, mouth and part of the nose were there. The top half of the head was gone. I swallowed hard and kept on typing. More bits of people were flourished, more victims perished in full-colour close-up.
After several minutes of the dead, dying and maimed, the “rushes” cut to the nearest hospital; it was overwhelmed. Bleeding men and women were being carried back out to cars, to be taken to the nearby town of Tyre because this place was full, overflowing with disaster. Inside, a few doctors ran from one shattered body to another.
I lost the emotional battle when the camera settled on a toddler lying on his back in a corner of a room, screaming in agony, his little face disfigured. He began twitching as his life ebbed away. Slowly, the camera pulled out and panned to a woman lying lifeless beside him. His mother, perhaps.
I saw all of this. Viewers saw only some of it. Is that censorship? Or is it common sense?
British TV did not show the gore in any detail. BBC, ITN, SKY have guidelines – and traditions – about what can be aired. Are their “civilized” standards welcome? Tel Aviv sitting rooms saw much the same as London and Glasgow (and Washington and New York). The Israeli nation's programme editors broadcast a sanitised version of the aftermath, saying the 106 deaths were an accident. Arab studios showed it all.
The blood of Qana spilled across Lebanon, fuelling recruitment figures for Hezbollah. Similar scenes in Gaza and the West Bank swelled the ranks of Hamas. The reluctance of the Saudi royals and other Arab sheikhs to put their mouths where their money was and openly back the Palestinians created more radical martyrs for fundamentalism and spawned al-Qaeda. Their version of Islam, where Sharia law decides everything, already had many followers from Algeria to Egypt and now found common cause with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Suddenly the world and its reporters were faced with mind-boggling violence apparently committed for religious rather than territorial or material reasons. When the Twin Towers fell five years after Qana, we showed some Palestinians dancing in the streets of several cities, but the allied American response travelled far beyond Israeli-Palestinian areas of conflict.
The Islamic crusade to reverse The Crusades
Invasions and revenge raids into Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by confused support for Arabs springing to oust autocrats in a host of neighbouring nations, particularly Libya and Syria, combined to slake an historical thirst that had been parched for centuries. The Islamic crusade for a caliphate to reverse The Crusades was underway. Determined to subdue or wipe out their Shia rivals and slaughter all infidels on the road from Istanbul to Madrid (via Damascus), a myriad of Sunni jihadist groups appeared out of the regional blood mist.
None has dominated coverage like Islamic State, which has (or should have) perplexed journalists about how far press freedom should go in portraying their slaughters in murderous detail. In 1996, I had no strong view on what to show. I edited out the grisly bits of Qana for the United States because they just wouldn't show them. I left in a few for the Far East because they would. With scores of television stations taking the same satellite news package, sometimes you simply passed the buck to them in deciding what to screen.
So what determined then how far each country went? Lack of technology (money) in much of the Third World resulted in plenty of African nations, whatever their politics, turning round the same prepared pictures – we never fully established which country was regularly rumoured to screen five Monday-to-Friday News At Tens consecutively as its world review of the week.
There were variations on what was acceptable to different societies on ethnic or cultural grounds. Westerners at one time were fond of saying that life was cheap in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, ignoring the blatant fact that generations of foreign war in Indo-China had bled out some of the fear of death. Japanese barbarism during conflict (Korea, China, the Second World War) was not unique. What was unusual was the appetite for graphic detail. Yet the criteria were not racial. The same people who showed none of this when they were the Soviet Union were relishing it as reborn Russians. Was airing all of it regarded as a reclaimed freedom?
Many in the TV news agencies in the late 20th century believed that the White House only got serious about “doing something” in Bosnia as a result of a single transmission: women and children queuing for bread in Sarajevo were blown to bits by a shell burst. American viewers saw little of the butchery, but their political leaders did. Visual experience often prompts action.
We in the news agency often debated whether TV violence created it elsewhere. Were programme editors across the globe whetting or dampening appetites by showing more or less trauma? If the Qana carnage uncut inflamed Arabs to previously unconsidered acts of violence, would the same happen in more peaceful societies that had been stable for decades? Would more of the sensational (in the true sense of that word) detail of filmed tragedy have Britons up in arms? Or would they sink into their sofas and flicker between secret excitement, helplessness and eventual compassion, fatigue and apathy?
Now, 18 years on, , the dilemma on what to show has deepened. Not only is visual horror more widespread, the internet has increased access to it exponentially. In newspapers and on TV a form of censorship has always operated as the hard stuff filters through several hierarchal hands. Not so online. YouTube and a host of social media have persuaded some that anyone is a journalist now.
And it's no longer just a question of taste. A generation ago, if people died and the cameras were near, it was recorded, so that others could decide the distribution and detail of the pictures. Since then, people have killed others FOR the cameras. The men of violence, and they're nearly always men, have their own media agenda.
Ten years before Qana, one of our TV agency journalists was taken hostage in Beirut. For more than five years we got little or no word of the fate of John McCarthy, despite a strong campaign by his friends, colleagues and loved ones. Thankfully, like most of the others kidnapped in reprisal for the US/UK bombing of Libya, he was eventually freed from Lebanon.
It's very different now. When ISIS organises a “live” beheading of some valued innocent it not only calls the tune on countless internet “hits” but also writes the next day's banner headlines. How long before its PR people call the newsdesks direct with transmission time and macabre shotlist?
A few dancing Palestinians wasn't the only sidebar story in the aftermath of the planes plunging into the heart of America. Buried in the acres of newsprint that month I remember a report of al-Qaeda leaders clustering round a TV set somewhere in the Afghan/Pakistan mountains that Tuesday and Osama bin Laden shushing his acolytes' whoops of joy when the first hijacked civilian airliner hit the tower with a triumphant cry of “Wait, wait … wait till you see what happens next!”
And perhaps we ain't seen nothing yet.
A recent book on ISIS by Patrick Cockburn pointed out that a video claiming to show a beheading by the jihadist group was actually the work of the most brutal of the Mexican drug cartels. Reporting this in October, The Observer went on to quote the city of Tijuana's chief forensic examiner for the police, on a profound change in dealing out death, whether the killers pursue profits or prophets: “The difference is this: in what I would call normal times, I kill you and make you disappear. Now, they are shouting it, turning it into a grotesque carousel around their territory. In normal conditions, the torture and killing is private, now it is a public execution using extreme violence, and this is significant.”
Our job as journalists was often to find the courage and energy to expose the silent kidnappers and killers. Now that they seek our assistance in shouting their crimes from the rooftops, is it time for a real debate on what is censorship and what is common sense?