If you dig down into recent news coverage of the disaster in the Philippines, you’ll find Americans complaining that they were horrified at graphic images of victims dead and dying on television, in print and online.
Some ask: Do we really need to see all this?
My answer is yes, absolutely. You’re better off if we don’t protect you from reality. In fact, I think it would be even better if you could not just see it, but also touch it, smell it, have a cry amid the ruins. What I’ve seen is that the blameless victims actually suffering in the shambles of the calamity are even more horrified than you are — and they have no remote control in their hands to just turn it all off.
Exposing Americans to the despair of other people’s lives — whether shattered by natural disaster or man-made war — makes us all smarter for the times when we help decide on the policies of our own nation.
But it’s up to the media to put that reality in front of you, which it didn’t used to do. I’ll never forget a terrible earthquake I covered for ABC News years ago in southern Italy’s Apennine Mountains. Dozens of towns had collapsed; the death toll was in the thousands. On day one, a camera crew and I stumbled into one town where a church had crumbled during evening Mass and crushed 100 people. While recording the horrors all around us, a white helicopter appeared over a hill and landed. The first man to emerge was Pope John Paul II.
On his way into the rubble that had been a church, he stopped four men carrying out a body covered by a sheet. He lifted the sheet and kissed the temple of the bloody, mangled corpse. Right in front of us.
That night, needless to say, the pope’s kiss was the heart of my story. It said so much about Pope John Paul II, about the earthquake, about the victims, about Italy.
But as we were completing our transmission from Naples, a producer in New York on the other end of the phone asked me, “Have you got something we can use instead of the shot of the pope kissing the dead guy?” After all, “World News Tonight” came on at dinnertime.
It is a struggle that continues to this day. Do we show the audience what life really looks like? Or protect them from the ugly reality? The sad answer used to be the latter. But in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, the World Trade Center and Hurricane Katrina, things finally are changing.
In movies, too. There’s a tormenting scene in the current film “12 Years a Slave” in which the title character is forced to lash a female slave tied to a stake. When he can do no more, the sadistic slave owner takes over. Other movies might show three, four, maybe five strikes of the whip, then relieve the audience of its suffering. But not in this film: an unrelenting total of 55 bloody cuts.
We don’t need to be relieved; we need to be reminded of how inhumanity looks, so that the next time we’re thinking of hurting someone, we might think twice.
Likewise, the opening scenes of D-Day in “Saving Private Ryan” went on … and on … and on … bombarding audiences with the bloody agony of the Americans who stormed the Normandy beach. Unlike typical fare on the big screen, it lasted long enough to make us squirm in our seats. It was the grisly horror of war … which lasted even longer, of course, for the men in the real battle. That’s something we need to understand when war is in our nation’s sights.
So when you see this stuff, be uncomfortable. It only hurts for a moment, but it might stick with you forever. That’s a good thing.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen was a correspondent for ABC News for 23 years, then for HDNet television’s “World Report.”
