When a conscience just gets in the way

In a very interesting article in the Daily Mail, correspondent Ben Brown confesses that he became so hardened to death, suffering and misery in the pursuit of the next big story that he became almost inhuman. Here’s an extract.

The little boy was ravaged by cholera and had just minutes left to live. His mother, lying beside him, had already surrendered to the disease and her eyes were wide with death.

It was Goma, 1994, and thousands of Rwandan refugees were dying every day in the epidemic.

The boy was no different from the others. Soon his emaciated corpse would be scooped up by the body collectors, thrown into a dumper truck and tipped into a mass grave nearby.

In our air-conditioned, four-wheel-drive vehicle, we had driven past him three times while he lay sprawled and dying on a dusty roundabout.

Each time he was worse, but we were too busy gathering material for that night’s BBC news to really notice him. Or at least I was.

Suddenly, Chuck, my American cameraman, shouted: ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t just keep driving past that kid. I’ve got to stop and help him.’

I sighed to myself. That’s all I need, I thought. We had to get more footage and interviews. Every minute was precious. We just couldn’t afford the luxury of salving our consciences.

‘Look, we’re journalists not aid workers,’ I wanted to tell Chuck. ‘Once you start, where on earth do you stop? If you help one, you have to help them all. How do you choose who to help, without playing God?’

But I knew Chuck wasn’t in the mood to listen, even if I’d said all this out loud. In the end we took the boy to a French army hospital where he gradually recovered. Chuck had saved his life.

If we’d wanted to, we could have probably saved dozens, maybe hundreds more.

For years afterwards, I’ve questioned my emotions at that time: was I too hard, too driven, too blind to the suffering all around me? Had I seen so much, in Goma and elsewhere, that I had built a wall of concrete around my heart to protect myself?

Other reporters in Goma pretended they were helping when really they were causing chaos.

I saw one television correspondent from a European network throwing sweets into a crowd of desperate children. Inevitably, she started a mass brawl, as the children fought each other for the sweets.

It was survival of the fittest and, of course, it made great pictures.

Just as callous was the American anchorman I saw spraying his hair as he prepared to go on air. He didn’t seem to care about the cholera-struck refugees behind a fence just a few feet away.

There was something obscene about it, and also the fact that every night, the Press corps would go back to a hotel, just a few hundred yards from the refugees.

There, we would feast on steak and chips, and drink cool beers. Of course, we had to eat but it seemed surreal to be enjoying ourselves while people were dying nearby.

Returning to my home in Fulham, South-West London, from trips such as these was like re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere after a voyage to outer space. I could be walking around mass graves in the morning and then, after an overnight flight home, shopping with my family the next day.

Once, in a supermarket aisle, I looked down at my feet and realised I was still wearing the same Timberland boots that had been traipsing amid the dead.

One of my children started crying because I wouldn’t buy her chocolate. I wanted to say: ‘Don’t you know there are children starving in Africa and dying of cholera? Don’t you care?’

But of course she didn’t know. She was a toddler, why should she?

At night, when the dreams came, I would see my own children in the refugee camps, their bodies skeletal and contorted with cholera.

. . .

Then there is the guilt of intruding into people’s lives just when they’re at their most desperate. It’s hard to escape the feeling that I’ve sometimes exploited them, pushing a microphone under their chin or a camera lens into their face.

At the earthquake in Turkey in 1999, I met a woman whose home was a pile of rubble and whose family were all dead. Her hands played absently with some crockery. It was pretty much all that she had left. Crassly, I asked her how she felt.

‘I’ve lost my whole world, my whole life,’ she told me, ‘and you dare to ask me how I feel.’ I shrank away, ashamed.

As objective journalists, we’re taught not to ‘cross the line’ – in other words, not to get involved. Our job is to observe events, but not to intervene. I suppose the fear is that we could become like the time traveller who fools around with history and changes the future.

By this law, Chuck was wrong about the dying boy in Goma and I was right, but it still leaves you with an empty feeling that you could and should have done more.

To be a foreign correspondent may seem glamorous, but I suspect all of us who have done the job have been damaged in some way.

There’s more at the link.

Brown’s not alone in his reactions, of course. Journalist Edward Behr wrote an autobiography that was published (in England) under the title, ‘Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English?’ The title was a quotation from the words of a reporter striding through another refugee camp, looking for a story, and shouting that question to those around him.

I saw at first hand in South Africa the callous disregard for human life of some correspondents. One incident in particular sticks in my memory. At the height of the violence in one township, I witnessed a US camera crew, working for one of the Big Three broadcast networks (I could name it, but I won’t), handing out candy and cash to a group of young people. As I watched, the youths dispersed to hiding-places on the side of the road, while the TV crew set up their cameras at a safe distance, climbing onto the roof of their van to get a clear picture.

The next time a police vehicle came down the road, the youths jumped up and threw stones at it, all for the benefit of the cameras. The police fired back – with shotguns rather than stones – and three of the youths were hit, one very badly. Their comrades carried them towards the TV crew’s van, calling for the journalists to take them to the nearest hospital; but the reporters hurriedly jumped down from the roof, climbed into their van, and headed for the city a short distance away. They had to make a deadline with their film, after all . . .

The badly injured youth died. I know. I was there, holding a bottle of water to his lips when he passed away, spitting bloody water all over me with his final, agonized paroxysm of coughing. Did those journalists care that by ‘buying’ a few seconds of video for the evening headlines, they’d condemned a teenager, probably no older than 14 or 15, to death? I doubt it. I doubt it very much. I know they did, in fact, incite those youths to do what they did, because I spoke to some of them afterwards and learned what had transpired.

No, I don’t have much respect for journalists, be they foreign correspondents or any other representative of the species. There are some good ones, but I fear they’re greatly outnumbered by those who simply don’t care at all. Their only motivation appears to be to build their own reputations and careers, at the expense of anyone they can use in the process. The exceptions are rare jewels, sometimes heard of but seldom encountered.

Peter