Hitchens’s Rule of Outrage

Peter Hitchens writes:

I did not know Marie Colvin, though I have certainly seen her across crowded rooms, usually at award ceremonies (I try as hard as I can to avoid war zones) and couldn’t possibly have been unaware of her extraordinary bravery and persistence. There’s no doubt she lived an admirable life, and demonstrated real courage. I think I disagree with her view of the world in general, but I also think her decision to stay behind with a group of potential massacre victims in East Timor was so powerfully selfless that it deserves an actual monument.

I have known other reporters – in more than one notable case also women – who have a similar disregard for physical danger, and in some cases (let this not be denied) an actual joy in venturing into high, hard remote places where danger and discomfort are certain. There are some, often photographers, who are exhilarated greatly by the noise and fear of battle. I rather envy them. I have enough imagination to know why they enjoy it and why they yearn for the summons to the war zone. But I have too much imagination, and too much fondness for my own skin, to follow them.

I’ve mentioned before that in a long newspaper career I have, almost inevitably, blundered into one or two war zones. I never meant to. Once, a prosaic trip to record the slow takeover of East Germany by the West led, by a series of wholly unpredictable but unavoidable steps, to going from East Berlin to Budapest, from Budapest to Szeged, and then to my crossing into Romania just before Christmas 1989. I think my then office just took the view that as I was already half-way there, I might as well keep going as it was cheaper. I swallowed hard and duly kept going. The best part of it was the leaving - I did what I had for many years longed to do, went down to the station and got on the first train out, not caring where it went as long as it was somewhere else.There were no tickets. As it happened, it took me (in the company of the highly civilsied and hospitable members of a Russian orchestra) through the lovely mountains of Bulgaria to Sofia, which seemed like Paris after Bucharest.

Most of what I saw in Romania now seems farcical – Romanians were given to exaggeration and weeping hysteria. But luckily I didn’t believe the tales of horror I was told in the border town of Arad, about what lay ahead on the road to Bucharest (actually I took the train, which ran to time and which I reckoned would be safer by far than a car if the reports, delivered with much wailing and gesticulation, of Secret Police helicopters strafing the roads were in fact true).

I am not at all ashamed to admit that I (literally) hid under my bed when shooting broke out just outside my Bucharest Hotel. I was in the middle of a long-awaited phone call to my home when it started, so I couldn’t pretend to my wife that all was calm. But under the bed was the place to be. I could see through the uncurtained windows the tracer streaking about the place, and I’d read enough accounts of lives ended by stray bullets to conclude that this was the only sensible thing to do. I’d do it again, too. As it turned out, the shooting was meaningless, done for show and not a battle at all, but I didn’t learn that till later.

But the following day I went to visit one of the Bucharest hospitals, and there saw quite a lot of people, in dirty beds, swathed in stained bandages, horribly pale, who had been hit by bullets, stray or otherwise. I imagined myself as one of them, and inwardly swore to do all in my power to avoid it for as long as I lived.

So imagine my feelings a bit more than a year later when, in Vilnius to report on Lithuania’s peaceful secession from the USSR, I was attending a dull and worthy press conference and a shouting person rushed into say that the Soviet Army had begun shooting people. So they had (my account of this miserable episode is to be found in ‘The Cameron Delusion’) . I can’t say I hurried with any enthusiasm to the scene. The same was true of my unintended landing in Somalia, just before Christmas 1992 (these things always seem to happen in the very dead of winter) which I describe in ‘The Rage Against God’. I also got into some bad trouble in the Congo a few years ago, the only one of these occasions when I have had a pretty strong sense that I might actually be about to die (though I had a more concentrated terrifying moment while riding my bicycle through Peckham and nearly being trapped between a lorry and its trailer, when I really *did* think that I was about to die and felt strong physical terror).

So it’s not for me. Is that why I also tend to resist the reporter’s justification for doing these things - that we must bear witness, and expose the misdeeds of tyrants. Why must we? In what way is a reporter qualified to decide the rights and wrongs of what he or she, for a few days or hours, witnesses as an outsider who often doesn’t even know the local alphabet, and needs an interpreter to tell him which is the gents and which the ladies? On this basis he can conclude that the rebels are right, and the government is wrong? Well, hardly, yet this is what is increasingly allowed, and encouraged to happen.

In a way I wouldn’t mind if it were sustained. But the pattern is always the same – a great deal of coverage designed to encourage international pressure and/or intervention. Plentiful coverage of the intervention or ‘revolution’ up to its ‘success’ . Then silence. I can remember when BBC News bulletins were dominated every night by South Africa. Yet how often do we now hear a word about what is going on there? Iraq is barely covered. After the wild euphoria of Tahrir Square, detailed coverage of what has followed in Egypt has been comparatively sketchy and infrequent. As for Libya, the failure by most media organisations to record the scandalous outcome of Western intervention is an active disgrace. Libya is fast becoming a failed state, with criminal gangs roaming unchecked and racially-bigoted arbitrary arrests and mass torture worryingly frequent and unrestrained. This is what we helped to bring about with our ill-informed enthusiasms. Shouldn’t we at least be more interested?

There’s another sort of selectivity as well. Pro-Israel journalists such as me have known for years about the Syrian government’s tendency to murder its citizens, particularly the great 1982 Hama massacre under Hafez Assad, since when the ‘West’ has several times attempted to make Syria into its ally. But the mass of the press corps seldom if ever mentioned these things concentrating as they were on the villainies of Israel next door. And then of course there’s Bahrain, where the furious repression of Shia protestors has by and large been forgotten, and doesn’t seem to worry William Hague half as much as similar action in Syria.

Hitchens’s Rule of Outrage for Foreign Ministries and Journalists states ‘Where outrage is selective, it’s not genuine. It may therefore have a purpose which has little to do with compassion, and much to do with politics and diplomacy’.

This of course does not mean that brave journalists shouldn’t do their jobs, or that their courage should be demeaned. But those who read what they write, or watch their reports on TV, should always ask why this particular crisis, this particular country, has attracted attention and coverage, while others, similar if not worse, go ignored. It costs a lot of money to send a reporter to a war zone. Someone has to decide when it is worth it, and when it is not. How and why are these decisions taken?