BBC News Violence Porn
Published by steve j January 5th, 2008 in generalNo, I’m not trying to get search engine hits with the post title… I am just getting increasingly upset with the tendency of reporters to throw a horrific or shocking statement into their pieces on television.
*** Please don’t read the next bit if you don’t want to be disturbed in the way I was - skip to the next asterisks ***
I am responding in particular to a piece on the BBC where a female reporter was walking around the site of the church in Eldoret, Kenya that was burnt down in the violence - bad enough - but then finished with a description of how a woman managed to escape through a back window with her three children, but as she got out, some of the perpetrators grabbed her three-year-old and threw them back into the inferno, where they perished in the flames. To be left with such horror is disturbing beyond belief. It left me devastated - I’ve been trying really hard to believe in the good bits of humanity, then you hear something like this and are left reeling… in my case in tears. Its so visceral when you have a child of your own - you would do anything to protect them, and to imagine this kind of violent attack on a helpless little person who you love desperately is unimaginable.
Did she need to say this just to hammer home the point? Was she just too freaked out and had to get it off her chest? I was horrified enough just looking at the scene and imagining how grim it must have been.
*** OK after here ***
I just think that reporting is beginning to resort to the same fate as British television in general - just push the shock factor because people love it; they just can’t get enough. Violence included, it seems - am I alone in feeling like my head is being hijacked?
I grew up in Northern Ireland, where news was never exactly a bundle of laughs, to say the least. Every day was death and destruction - we became immune to it even without the explicit descriptions of what exactly was going on - and I’m pretty sure there could have been quite a bit of graphic detail had reporting standards been what they are now. What I wonder is if the children of today will become immune to ever-increasingly shocking news, making almost nothing seem inhumane.
I do suffer from being unable to rid myself of nightmarish visions like this - they pop back into my head during banal moments, like travelling on the tube or buying an espresso somewhere - so I wish they’d stop, and it makes me all the more determined to avoid watching TV. You could argue that I’m burying my head in the sand, trying to avoid the realities of a cruel world, and maybe you’d be hitting on some truth there, but I can’t superimpose these horrors on the smile of my little boy as he plays without a care in the world, feeling safe as can be.
On another note, I threw up a quick stop-motion video collage of the Air tour from this year on YouTube. Not exactly Oscars material but its a bit of fun.
Its been a while Bones…
Not quite sure your argument holds here. Why do you presume that news reporting of this sort is just aimed at shocking people for the sake of entertainment? Why might not the aim of this story have been to convey the basic horror of what happened, and to hope that you would have the response that you had. The point may have been that this shit happens, and that you need to take notice - or maybe that’s why you feel you’ve been hijacked? Are you being forced to think about something real, something truly awful, and its disturbing you out of your comfort zone?
The risk that people become inured to this sort of message is very real, and the example you give is one that is most familiar and most terrible. Terrible because what was happening was all around us, but because we lived where we lived it didn’t really affect us (except very occasionally, and normally vicariously). None of us should let it be like that. We have to take note and perhaps to act.
I’ll give you another couple of standard examples familiar in my walk of life. A few years ago an abortion group (styled as a political party) wanted to put stills footage of the aftermath of third stage abortions on TV as a party election broadcast. Not something many people would want to see, and hence the broadcasters refused to air it (there’s a prohibition on ‘offensive’ programming). Irrespective of one’s own view one this, though, its difficult to argue with the underlying logic: (1) the law in the UK allows abortion late in pregnancy, (2) people ‘write’ the laws (or at least tacitly accept them), (3) people can’t really want this - ref to footage (4) people could only accept this law if they didn’t appreciate what they were permitting (5) we - the group - need to ’shock them’ out of their willfully ignorant quiesence (6) people don’t have the right to allow something to happen, and then refuse to acknowledge the consequences. The group - the ProLife Alliance - brought the case to court but lost in the house of Lords. In December ‘07, an animal rights group brought a similar - although much less graphically disturbing - case to court challenging a parallel ban on their right to buy advertising space on tv to convey their message.
SO what’s my point then - even I’m not so sure, and my dinner’s on the table. Stay comfortable - and we can speak anon - let’s not be stone hermits.
DocScott - a long time indeed… excellent.
Firstly, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I called this kind of news “entertainment” as such - my point was simply that reporters now feel they have to push the boundaries of graphic detail to get the point across, often beyond what is necessary to convey the sense of horror that prevails in the piece anyway, ultimately leading to desensitisation. It may have been a bit rash of me to claim that “people love it” referring to this kind of journalism, thouugh I do think there is increasingly some kind of addiction to it.
You mentioned activists trying to shock people into the reality of a moral issue by means of graphic footage. In this case, however, there is no alternative - the reality of late-term abortion is horrific whatever way you look at it, so I would think that the use of ANY footage is going to be highly effective in getting the point across in my opinion. I’m quite sure that these same activists would not need to select the most horrendous examples to just hammer the point home. In addition, I also believe that subjection to this kind of material ultimately leads to an increased threshold for tolerance, and a never-ending spiral where those seeking to make a point feel they have to go further because it takes “that much more” to jolt people out of their indifference. You must admit that this has been the case for much of our visual communications over the past few decades - think of the violence in films, for example.
Let me ask you this: suppose the ProLife campaign had made it to air. It would have been shocking, no doubt about that, but what about the next time they wanted to run a campaign - do you think the same content would be as effective? How many times could subjection to the same imagery actually have the desired effect? If the answer is that the viewer responds less strongly over time, then perhaps we can agree that it is not the actual subject matter portrayed in the imagery that is causing the shock or discomfort, but rather the simple fact that they had “never seen anything like it”.
As far as “taking action” versus retreating into one’s comfort zone - this is a difficult area, and I wrestle with it a lot. I don’t deny I do try and keep my family safe within the cocoon afforded to us by the circumstances of our life in suburban London. However, with much of the journalism to which I refer in my post, taking action is not relevant - the Kenyan church-burning for example is so far beyond anything I can actually influence, though my awareness of the situation in east Africa has been heightened (before the piece referred to in my post, may I add) - a case of “taking note” as you say.
I am still not convinced that “extreme reporting” has any bearing on whether or not we will feel compelled to take action, and in most cases, I do not believe that the motive for such journalism is to achieve this aim in the first place - returning to my original argument. I hope not become a “stone hermit”, aware that with a family to protect there is definitely a comfort there. Anon, Doc.