Financial Times, July 27/28, 1996, p. XVIII. War of words over the facts By Peter Aspden It must be tough to return from a spell of duty as a war correspondent to a gentle, civilised, country such as Britain. One minute you are witnessing the most unspeakable atrocities committed in the name of politics, religion or just for the hell of it; the next, you are listening to heated debate over the future of the rugby Five Nations Championship. It does nothing for your sense of perspective. Martin Bell, who covered the Bosnian war with such distinction for the BBC, left the stench of the Srebrenica mass executions to breathe the irrelevant odours of Euro-scepticism and National Lottery-mania over the media airwaves. It shocked him to the core, as he revealed in a recent speech: "I ask myself: is this my country? Is it even my planet?" Bell's exasperation has led him to question the model of balanced, dispassionate, objective journalism which has been the bedrock of BBC -- and indeed most serious newspaper and broadcasting -- journalism. He now calls it "bystander journalism". "What I believe in now is what I prefer to call the journalism of attachment, a journalism that cares as well as knows." Predictably, this has set alarm bells ringing. Traditionalists fussed over their hallowed dictum -- facts are sacred, comment is free -- with scarcely a pause for reflection. It is precisely when issues take on a tragic, awful dimension, they argued, that one needs to stick to the facts of the matter. There is no room for sentiment on the front lines. But Bell's point is well made. The trouble with facts, or at least those which are given privilege by traditional journalism, is that they are hard, cold, numbing. If, while reporting on Srebrenica, one talks about diplomatic initiatives, talks about talks, United Nations troop movements, one soon loses one's audience. It is a lesson which even academics, those ultimate upholders of cool objectivity, have come to appreciate. I remember the American philosopher Richard Rorty beginning a lecture on human rights to Oxford University students with a harrowing account of a Bosnian Moslem having his penis bitten off. The atmosphere became electric, no mean feat for the Sheldonian Theatre. We probably would not hear of such incidents in a normal news account from Bosnia; we certainly would not see anything related to it, on grounds of poor taste. But the sexual sadism which is a component of virtually every ethnic cleansing campaign there has ever been is a fact, too. Not a cold, hard fact, but one which has the power to move people. Therein lies its strength. It is not as if the media show any consistency here. On certain occasions, they are only too willing to allow news reports to emote. When we see an interview with a distressed relative whose family has been wiped out or gone missing, we are meant to feel for them. And the police exploit that feeling: they hope that public compassion will turn to solid leads. The facts here are heart-wrenching. But, more importantly, they are facts with which we can identify. It requires little imagination to see ourselves in the wretched situation we watch on the small screen. We know what it is like to lose a loved one, or we feel we know. What we find difficult is to move from micro to macro. What happened at Srebrenica, like what happened at Auschwitz and Belsen, is almost unimaginable. And faced with the unimaginable, we go cold. This applies to news reports as well as the self-defence mechanisms of our fragile emotions. One cannot countenance sitting down after dinner in front of the television to hear of such brutalities, let alone see them. But that is no excuse. The trouble with cold facts is that they harden, while all the time we should be being tenderised. And then we fall to that terrible disease of fattened western sensibilities, "compassion fatigue". We should listen to Martin Bell. He knows a thing or two about human behaviour which most of us choose to exclude from our worldview. We should have heard more from him on the horrors of Bosnia, and less on the grotesquely inadequate responses of our gentle, civilised countries as they sought to respond to the unthinkable. [End]