When the News Becomes Unbearable

We seem to be in one of those phases when opening a newspaper or turning on a radio or a television becomes an act of conscious will.

“Do I really want to read this?” is what a number of people have said they have felt before starting to peruse their daily paper. It’s not surprising and who can blame them?

The news has been unrelievedly grim. And as a letter to the editor of the New York Times stated correctly, 32 dead in Blacksburg is usually just another daily tally of death in Baghdad.

Meanwhile in Iraq, it is almost as if the bombers decided to engage in a brutal form of one-upsmanship by killing almost 200 people on a day when Americans were reeling from the news from Virginia Tech. The higher death toll which would have been a lede on any other day was relegated to “in other news” references in newscasts.

If it couldn’t get any worse, NBC News received a post-mortem multi-media package from Cho Sueng-Hui himself. Cho, as we all now know, was the deeply disturbed student who shot 32 of his fellow students to death and then turned the guns on himself.

NBC’s Difficult Decision

NBC called in the FBI but also agonized over whether it should show the videos of Cho’s hate filled rantings. In the end, it decided to do so, and aired it on Wednesday April 18’s Nightly News.

In introducing the segment and the video, NBC’s Brian Williams warned viewers that it would be difficult to watch. He spoke briefly about the care that NBC took in making sure that the most egregious elements were edited out. Then it was shown along with comments from former FBI profilers, psychologists who explained what Cho’s disease was and how it manifested itself.

It was riveting television, but after watching it, I wondered what I had learned, if anything. But I felt as though I had been part of some voyeuristic – almost obscene experience. I turned off the TV set, diminished and depressed by watching NBC News.

News Pornography?

Reaction is setting in around the blogosphere about whether NBC did the right thing. To give the network credit, they did try to frame the Cho video in terms that were as helpful as possible. The interviews with police, educators and mental health personnel were powerful and useful. But I was left with the impression that we had been subjected to a not-so subtle form of news pornography.

A few other broadcasters (mostly foreign) have decided not to broadcast the Cho tapes, insisting that to air the thoughts of a disturbed person has no inherent journalistic value. That may be a laudable statement, but in the age of the internet it seems to be a minor gesture in a media landscape where the competitive instincts overwhelm good journalistic instincts.

Foreign Vs Domestic?

Just as the news from Blacksburg was being aired on the evening newscasts last Monday night, a colloquium was taking place in New York. Called “Talking to The Enemy” it was co-hosted by the Overseas Press Club [1] and the London-based Frontline Club [2] and brought together some eminent British and American journalists to talk about foreign reporting in a time of war.

The panel was moderated by Jon Snow from Channel 4 in the UK. On the panel were Deborah Amos (NPR), Roger Cohen (New York Times), David Loyn (BBC), David Marash (Al Jazeera), freelance journalist Jon Alpert and Robert Pollock (Wall Street Journal).

In retrospect, the contrast between the coverage of Virginia Tech and the work of foreign correspondents was enormous and yet, there were some disturbing similarities.

As Americans were learning about the horror of a campus slaughter in their midst, many in the audience and on the panel were similarly appalled. But the reporting of ongoing death and mayhem in Iraq was frequently mentioned as a story that remains important, but increasingly difficult to sustain audience (and editors’) interest. In my experience, it’s called “compassion fatigue” and it happens whenever a long running story starts to wear down the audience.

Should Journalists Define the “Enemy?”

Most of the passion that evening came over whether the correspondents should be talking to the “enemy” – however that term is defined.

On this point, there was quite a difference between the Brits and the Yanks even when they might agree on the premise that the war in Iraq is the wrong one to be fighting right now. Our British colleagues were more convinced that there was no enemy, as such. Rather they saw this in more historical terms of how the West and the Muslim world have interacted over the decades. American journalists were more generally disposed to think of Al-Qaeda as an “enemy” but that did not mean that they would be adverse to reporting on them and even interviewing Bin Laden should that scoop every materialize.

But I sensed a certain hauteur and sanctimony from our UK colleagues. And a lot of defensiveness from the Americans.

I may be just a recovering ombudsman, but no one mentioned the audience or the fact that in addition to talking to the enemy, we need to remind our publishers why foreign reporting is still so important, even though our attention may be riveted by events at Virginia Tech.

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