Outrage

First published in Column 8 on the 19^th August, 1992

During the Vietnam War the public expressed outrage when a piece of newsfilm seen on television showed a member of one side of the warring factors being shot in the head, and killed.

The outrage was because the end of a human life was treated as mere newsfodder. His personhood didn’t matter – he was being used as an example of the horrors of war.

No one denies those horrors. The horrors of modern life are multitudinous. What concerns me is that these horrors are more and more being used by the media in a way that turns us all into spectators at a gladiatorial bloodbath.

I have come across two examples recently, neither of which I sought out, and both of which linger on malevolently in the recesses of my mind. And if these two came to my attention so easily, how many more have there been that have not crossed my path?

I wrote a few weeks ago about the media and the royal couple, and the way in which the lives of these two were being abused. The lack of moral concern in some parts of the media is an abuse as sickening as sexual abuse of children.

You can say that by writing about them I’m extending the abuse still further. But unless someone writes, how do we combat the immoral flow?

The first instance occurred on television in one of those news compilation programmes, and discussed the murder of a teenage girl by her father.

This Middle Eastern family had emigrated to the States. The father lived by the old rules; the 15-year-old daughter wanted to live by the new. By his culture’s standards, the father considered her rebellious, especially when she went out and got an after-school job. The father forbade such behaviour. When the daughter continued to work, the father one night took a kitchen knife and stabbed her to death. In his culture that was ‘acceptable’ punishment for her behaviour.

Of course it wasn’t acceptable in the culture of the USA, and he was imprisoned. Nothing very startling about all that, you say. Nothing, except that somehow the US authorities had suspected foul play might occur, and had bugged the house. Unfortunately for the girl, no one was listening the night she died. Only a tape-recorder picked up the terrified screams as the child was repeatedly stabbed.

And those screams were played over and over on television. Not some actress simulating horror, but a child’s dying agonies as her own father killed her. Was the broadcast necessary?

The other situation is worse, and also involved young people: the murderer was around seventeen, the victim maybe a couple of years younger. These two boys were part of an ongoing Asian war. But the news magazine article in which they became known to the world was on revenge.

Somehow a photographer was there at the moment when the murderer, in revenge, used a heavy knife to stab his victim in the chest.

And now comes the part that sickens. That observer photographed the murder. He took more photos of the murderer now satisfied at having achieved revenge. Some editor paid that photographer for those photos, and a writer for writing about them. Some publisher published them. The victim’s personhood became nothing. His death was mere newsfodder.

In the 17^th century John Donne said, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind.’

Isn’t there a point where the objectivity of the media goes beyond the reporting, and reporters discern that they are involved in Mankind? Isn’t there a point where getting the news becomes much less important than the life of those involved? Is there any sense of moral outrage left?

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Since I wrote this article over thirty years ago people have become numb to such violence being shown on screen or on the Internet: either it’s reality, and real people die in front of our eyes, or it appears in movies and television with the kind of grisly detail that once would have been unacceptable in so-called entertainment. Such scenes are commonplace, and the media thrives on them.

Sadly, even the best of us are becoming immune to these scenes because they are innumerable.

It’s interesting that journalists who watched the hour long compilation of video shot by people who were attacked and killed in the invasion of Israel by Hamas on the 7^th of October, 2023, has proved that even the media is not entirely immune to the human suffering that was shown. Many of those audiences found themselves still able to be shocked.