Media: Coping with the ethics of sadness

Analysis

YET AGAIN, disaster has struck on an epic scale. Yet again, we find ourselves witnesses, at one remove, of scenes of unimaginable horror. In the past week, as Central America reeled from the lethal devastation of Hurricane Mitch, we have been able to sit on our comfortable sofas thousands of miles away, watching the tragedy unfold on the small screen in the living-room corner.

The deadliest Atlantic hurricane in 200 years has already claimed perhaps as many as 20,000 lives, and has left millions of people homeless, facing starvation and disease. Meanwhile, the by-now-familiar paradox rears its head once more. Into the world's most Dantean scenes of hell are parachuted hordes of reporters and television crews, with their laptop computers, wads of dollars and satellite phones.

The contradictions between the arriving wealth and the indigenous poverty could hardly be more stark. Any journalist who visits the scene of a natural disaster or a war zone is faced with the unsettling paradox of living comfortably amid the afflicted; Central America, with a clutch of expensive international hotels, is no exception. In Sarajevo, we were able to eat a substantial meal with wine every evening, at a time when, for ordinary Bosnians, a loaf of bread was an undreamed-of luxury. In Sarajevo, for what it is worth, few Sarajevans begrudged the fact that journalists had plenty to eat; they had much more savage injustices to worry about.

George Alagiah, who has won awards for his African coverage for the BBC, believes that a reporter would have to be "incredibly hard-hearted" not to reflect constantly on the uncomfortable contrasts between housed and homeless, and between well-fed and starving. But, he argues: "It's like with a nurse or a surgeon; to do your job, you have to stay fit and healthy." Like Alagiah, most correspondents put the contradictions to to one side, in the knowledge or belief that their reports can themselves play a key role in mobilising money or public opinion - as Michael Buerk so dramatically proved in Ethiopia in 1984. Money can help to alleviate natural disasters; political pressure can help to end wars.

By its nature, there is a ghoulish quality to the nature of disaster reporting. The worse the story, the better the story: 50 dead in some countries may be only a news-in-brief paragraph at the bottom of an inside page; 5,000 dead guarantees a place on television news all around the world. Everybody is booking tickets on the next flight out, and rooms in the expensive hotels (where the waiters are still wearing black ties, and the phones may even work) are soon booked up.

We criticise rubberneckers at natural disasters in this country. And yet, in some ways, reporters are just the same. It may not be prurience, but it sure as hell feels like it sometimes. A reporter at the dinner table may make a cheerfully dismissive comparison between this disaster, or war, and the last one that he or she covered ("These guys have got off lightly, you know - this is is nothing by comparison with what we were seeing in Place X last year"). This neat grading of nightmare, where every death and every loss can be upstaged by somebody else's loss in another country, makes for queasy listening, not least for the hovering barman or waiter who may have lost half his family, and for whom the suffering of this latest disaster is absolute.

Despite the popular conception, however, most journalists are not just a hard-bitten wild bunch, inhabiting some kind of emotion-free zone. Sure, they have frequent moments of morbid humour, just as doctors have theirs. But Richard Dowden, Africa correspondent of The Economist, and former Africa editor of The Independent, emphasises that those who have witnessed the effects of (for example) the Rwandan genocide were left "deeply, deeply distressed - you never get used to it, you shy away from it". Dowden is not alone in talking of how he has "practically vomited" when sitting down to eat after a disturbing day.

Sometimes, ethics get lost along the way. Stories circulate of a reporter who could have rescued a child in the Colombian mudslide of 1985, in which thousands died, and failed to do so - because getting an exclusive story out mattered more than the child's life. It is perhaps significant, however, that the story (which may be apocryphal, though it purports to be accurate) is told by fellow reporters in shocked tones. It is seen, in other words, as the exception, not the rule.

Perhaps the most frequently heard criticism of reporting disasters is the intrusiveness of thrusting a camera into somebody's face or pulling out a notebook when somebody has suffered personal loss. And yet no reporter, on visiting the scene of a natural disaster or a massacre, has ever been short of people who want to describe the horrors that they have lived through. Overwhelmingly, those who have suffered are glad to find somebody who wishes to listen.

In Alagiah's words: "You're seeing people at their most grief-stricken moments. But I've never had anyone refuse to talk to me.

"An aid worker once tried to prevent me asking questions - but the head of the family stepped forward, because he wanted to tell his story."

Alagiah believes that the danger, if anything, is that the foreign television crew is invested with mystical powers that it does not possess. "People sometimes automatically assume that by talking to the BBC they have a lifeline to relief and succour. I would tell them that I couldn't guarantee anything would happen. But we are often seen as the precursors of aid."

Little can be done to dampen such unrealistic hopes. There is nothing very noble about much media work in disaster zones, and plenty to feel uneasy about.

Few on the ground would disagree, however, that it is better that the media should be there than that they should stay away - indeed, the aid agencies often help reporters to get through to the most difficult places, because of the positive role that they can play. As for the uncomfortable contradictions - they're here to stay.