Don't cloud the issue with fact!

Some thoughts on truth, fiction and reporting violence from a journalistic perspective

There is an established axiom in commercial journalism that states: "If it bleeds, it leads". This maxim acknowledges the fact that violence sells papers (and other forms of popular commercial media). In reporting war and crime, events are frequently sensationalised, selective and geared towards remote audiences who are often disengaged and indifferent to the implications and realities of the 'front line'.

As a result, the reportage is delivered as a form of spectacle, verging on entertainment. The prurient public obsession with carnage manifests itself as a demand for graphic third party encounters that engender judgement or censure. This is the vicarious Circus Maximus of the news consumer.   While it purports to be an account of events, it is necessarily embellished by the subjective reactions of the reporter, the mandate of the editor and the commercial imperatives of the publisher.  

The notional remit of professional journalism that seeks to deliver a dispassionate account of events - so-called "objective reporting" - is often abandoned to create a better story. Indeed there are elements within New Journalism that actively encourage the engagement of the reporter in the events, to the point where the news becomes autobiographical. The economic demands of the media organisations necessitate a "saleable' product. The texts are thus necessarily constructed to meet market demands.

The reporter conjures images designed to generate reaction from readers - this relies more on the perceptions of the writer and their ability to articulate it than the base events themselves - and thus the story becomes 'faction', a mixture of fact and fiction. Whatever 'truth' there might be at the foundation is blurred and lost under the imposed superstructure of descriptive verbiage.

The story itself acquires fluid dynamics as the ontological levels within it intersect at certain points. At one level of existence are the events themselves, then there is the interpreted 'reality' by the reporter, interlinked with the deconstructed and received images of the reader or viewer. The events become imaginative constructs once they are embedded in words, literally evolving figments of vocabulary, designed and calculated to elicit an emotive response.

Thus violence mutates into entertainment, as facts merge with fiction and perceptions are warped by embellishment. A transition from witness to raconteur takes place, a story is created for a specific audience.

Journalism, especially when reported from remote locations, is difficult, if not impossible, for most readers or viewers to verify. They are compelled to accept the interpretations of the reporter. Consequently the scenario is 'constructed' by the words of the reporter. The credibility of this testimony, of the witness, is dependent on the ability to generate images. It requires, even demands, a "sympathetic imagination" from the audience.

In this respect, reporting becomes fiction. It begins to enter the realm of literature as it seeks not to simply inform, but to evoke an emotional response. In fiction, the self and other occupy separate realms. The reader is made aware of the "created characters" and the scene-setting in the drama, and maintains a conscious distance from them. In effect the parameters between the text and the reader are set and remain fixed throughout the encounter. In anthropology and the social sciences, self and other tend to occupy the same realm, but retain distinctions of identity that are subconsciously entrenched. The evaluation dynamic is fluid and constantly tested by ongoing persistent inputs within the encounter which either reinforce or negate the precepts of the observer's belief system.

Psychologically news reporting of violence is received as drama, as literature. It is events that are distilled into words. Therefore, real violence becomes a catalyst for fiction. This is because fiction is more easily assimilated and allows readers to distance themselves while simultaneously becoming engaged with the subject. The reader is fascinated yet removed. This apparent contradiction is resolved through the merging of reportage and literature.

This is one of the main reasons that the military are now so acutely aware of the need to control and manufacture "news from the front". The transition from Vietnam to Iraq illustrates this clearly. Senseless and almost random acts of extreme violence are portrayed as having a higher purpose, part of an unfolding plan that will result in the greater good. The deployment of euphemisms masks the reality for the reader, as civilian casualties become "collateral damage", and the dead and wounded are blurred into a statistical spreadsheet.

Thus the story of violence is mediated through a form of fictitious literature - 'faction' - masquerading as war reporting.  As everything is resolved into a numerical tally sheet the fiction becomes complete. There are no souls, only numbers; no blood, only ink. There is no reality, only representation. In the end it is nothing more than a story that lingers briefly in memory until the turn of the page, where it is eclipsed  by the next tranche of compelling vocabulary.