Abstract
One of the worst things that John Major ever said – and he was not as bad a prime minister as he seemed at the time – was: “Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less.” Nothing wrong with the words themselves, they were just in the wrong order. What society really needs is to condemn a little less and understand a little more.
The same goes for journalists. Yes, of course, the first thing we need to do is find out what has happened, and then report it accurately and fairly – but the second task is to try to explain why. Why did the building collapse? Why did the plane crash? Why did 52 per cent of British voters vote for the UK to leave the European Union? And when we start asking why people behave as they do – why mass murderers murder, or why young Eritreans, Sudanese, Afghans, and Syrians risk their lives to seek sanctuary in Europe – we need to develop a much under-rated journalistic tool.
Empathy.
I was born with an unusually high level of the curiosity hormone. At the age of three, as revealed in a recently discovered letter written at the time by my mother, I refused to accept her attempts to fob off my incessant questioning with the words: “I am a big boy, and I want to know everything.”
But wanting to know everything – and then feeling compelled to tell everyone what you have found out, which is the essence of journalism – is not enough. Of all the Ws in the reporter's primer – Who, What, When, Where – it's the Why that has always interested me the most.
As anyone who has spent time with a young child will know, “Why?” is the first question we learn to ask. “Why can't I have an ice cream?” “Why do I have to go to bed?” “Why is the sky blue?” “Why is rain wet?” “Why are people horrible to me?” And then there's the killer question that my daughter used to have blazoned across the front of her T-shirt: “Why should I tidy my room when the world is such a mess?”
I first read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird at a very impressionable age. The lawyer-hero Atticus Finch, based on the author's own father and played in the film by Gregory Peck, became my role model. (In a book written before Mockingbird, but published only a couple of years ago, he was portrayed as a racist, but by then it was far too late to change my perception of him.)
Finch teaches his daughter Scout a lesson that is particularly pertinent for journalists: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
I describe in my recently-published memoir, Is Anything Happening?, how I had to learn to tiptoe through journalistic minefields when reporting for the BBC from the Middle East. And there is no better way to report from opposing sides in a conflict than to climb into the skins of people on each side. Writing about an Israeli military operation in Gaza in 2008, for example, I imagined I was writing first as a Palestinian, and then as an Israeli.
The Palestinian: “You want to know what it's like in Gaza at the moment? It's hell on earth. But that's nothing new – it's always hell on earth here. Since the day I was born, I have lived in a stinking, rotten prison, with no freedom and no dignity.”
The Israeli: “You want to know why Israel is attacking Hamas in Gaza? Do you know how many rockets they have fired at us since we left Gaza? How many times they have tried to send suicide bombers into Israel to kill us in our shopping malls and our bus stations? Have you any idea what it feels like when your neighbours are terrorists?”
Empathy: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. To give readers, viewers and listeners an opportunity to imagine what it is like to live in the midst of conflict, or tragedy. To enable them to understand what it is like to be another person, and why they behave as they do.
What drives a British teenager to leave home to join the Islamic State group? How can an American teenager turn a gun on teachers and classmates and slaughter them? In War and Peace, Prince Andrei's sister Maria says: “We should enter into everyone's situation. Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.” (“To understand everything is to forgive everything.”) I don't agree. The point in understanding is not to forgive, but to explain, and, if necessary, to devise a means to defend against a repetition of certain behaviour.
Journalism is a means to an end. It enables citizens to make decisions based on the best available information, provided, in part, by journalists. How do we defeat terrorists? Step 1. By understanding why they behave as they do. How do we respond to ill-informed voters making choices that will have a negative effect on their future lives? Step 1. By understanding why they voted the way they did.
When reporters go out to collect material for a story, with our notebook, camera and digital recorder in hand, we always look for “quotes”, or “clips”. A snatch, a comment, from a “real person”, or an “expert”, to provide the meat in our story. Look, we say, it's not me saying this, it's Jane X, or Joe Y.
It is an essential tool in the journalism kit, but on its own, it is never enough. To get to the heart of a story, we need to understand why someone says something, not just what they say. It even applies to politicians in studios, which is why one of my favourite interview questions was always: “But why do you say that?”
Journalism should be about listening, and that means listening to what is not said, as well as to what is said. Trying to imagine what it would be like to change places with an interviewee. What does it feel like to be a politician in the spotlight? An abuse victim who has been disbelieved for decades? A refugee who watched their family drown as they tried to reach Europe from north Africa?
But empathy requires time. And time is the one thing that, in the frenetic digital age, reporters are being denied. You can't walk around in someone else's skin in the space of a clickbait headline, a 140-character tweet, or a 20-second video clip.
So let's slow down and show a bit more empathy. For all our sakes.
