‘I paid a man to murder my mother, says remorseful daughter.” That was the opening line of a national television news bulletin. The next headline gloated about a report on a roaring trade in human body parts, the next about the exhumation of murder victims, after that the relatively pleasant story of a major road accident.
Such is now common fare on our television screens, an ever increasing depiction of violence and human degradation, a wallowing in blood- soaked medical detail, the prying inquisitions of society’s victims, the whole grisly menu.
However well-established, this kind of television reportage seems not yet to have gained itself a commonly recognised descriptive name. Some just call it slob-television, some try to give it a whiff of bogus respectability by calling it “reality”. Whatever its name, its calling is plain: let’s see who can best render the putrefaction and, in doing so, attract the most flies.
Last Sunday evening M-Net’s Carte Blanche re-broadcast a fastidious example of the battlefront genre, a Channel 4 programme called The Killing Zone in which an Irish-voiced television reporter, Sandra Jordan, brought us her frontline horror report of Israeli-occupied Gaza. At first this seemed an acceptable, if not necessary examination of the chaos and terror, the appalling human devastation of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. But as the programme went on you became a little uneasy about the way Jordan was presenting her material. This soon turned to incredulity.
The casualties of the Israeli military were depicted, at first almost without exception, as being children. Jordan took us on a tour of hospital wards, showing close-ups of grievously wounded children, each one accompanied by Jordan delivering lines like: “This 10-year-old longed to be a teacher. Now an Israeli bullet has blinded her for life. This little girl was playing innocently with her friends when an Israeli sniper blew away her head.”
Wherever Jordan went she pointed out the mortal danger to children of the Israeli’s occupation. Taking her version of Gaza at face value we were being prompted to believe that the Israeli soldiery had been instructed to be specific, to seek out and either massacre or maim Arab children in preference to all other targets.
Child casualties in war are sure-fire material for the reporter wishing to file impact-copy. I do not know anything about the Middle East furies, but I find it quite hard to believe that an Israeli sniper sitting in his eyrie 500m away would choose as his target a 10-year-old schoolgirl sitting at her desk in a classroom.
Everywhere she went, Jordan made sure there were plenty of young children around her. At times it seemed children were the only inhabitants. At every site Jordan would be seen ducking behind masonry giving terrified looks at the camera and then stage-whispering that she — and the children — had to take sudden cover from approaching Israeli forces. She literally trawled the battle zone for proof of her contention that the Israelis were bent on open genocide, that they hid in their enormous tanks and killed anyone who dared to appear in front of them. At every possible moment the camera would linger on Jordan’s face, wreathed in concern as it looked on the affliction.
We were shown the body of a young woman, “a foreign reporter/protester who has stood up in front of an Israeli bulldozer and [has] been run down”. Jordan’s commentary blamed it all on the bulldozer driver. He had done it viciously, on purpose. The girl who had been wearing bright clothing, quite obviously was a harmless protester. Maybe he did drive over her on purpose, but trying to understand what brought someone to such a pitch of inhumanity might have given a bit of perspective.
I don’t believe outsiders can take sides in the Middle East conflict. It involves an obscene Hobson’s choice between equivalent monsters in Arafat and Sharon. But you can be very sure that in the precincts of organisations like Channel 4 a lot of effort simply goes into trying to out-Pilger John Pilger. One couldn’t help but wonder how much of Sandra Jordan’s risk-filled reportage was aimed at the exposure of military occupation crimes and how much was exposure of her courageous journalism to a prestigious Bafta award judge’s panel. That she had a darn good shot at it, was even more obvious than a Pilger in her bias.
What she did was old hat to a sanctimonious breed of “personality” reporters, which rely on a perceived gullibility in their viewers, a cursory acceptance of what appears on the little screens. This is something that television itself has nurtured with its fantastical belief that attracting viewers is alibi to all restraint. It’s the prevailing self-deception: if you’ve got lots and lots of viewers you must be doing it right.
The end result was quite the opposite to what, presumably, was intended by the commissioning editors. The piece was so hideously one-sided that even the most uncritical of viewers must have wondered at its veracity.
Archive: Previous columns by Robert Kirby