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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JULY 19, 1985
PAGE 7
featured two heavily armed guerrillas.
One asked the other about the
strange-looking object on the tip of his automatic rifle. "What is that? A
silencer?" His compatriot replies, "No•••an amplifier." Actually it is a
television camera.
A critical review of the media's role (especially television) in the crisis
appeared in the "Essay" column in the July 15 TIME. It was written by a
frequent "Essay" contributor, Charles Krauthammer:
The problem of evil has long been the province of philosophy.
Philosophy is not particularly interested in that question any
more•••• Journalism has taken up the slack. Unfortunately, jour
nalism is not terribly well equipped to handle it, principally
because journalism is a medium of display and demonstration.
When evil is the subject, the urge to display leads to dark
places indeed.
Last month, for example, it led•••to Beirut,
where during 17 days of astonishing symbiosis, television and
terrorists co-produced--there is no better word--a hostage
drama....
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Driven•••by these two journalistic imperatives, technology and
competition, journalism will go where it can go. When it has the
technology, it shoots first and asks questions later. For the
correspondent bargaining for access to hostages, the important
questions are Can I· get the story/show? and Will anyone .else?
The question What am I doing? comes up after the tape has been
relayed from Damascus, if at all••••
Broadcast television imposes limits, strict but self-enforced
limits, on explicit sex. Why not on explicit terror?... A few
years ago, when some publicity seekers started dashing onto base
ball fields during televised games, TV producers decided to dis
courage the practice by averting the camera's eye. So now, the
crowd roars at the commotion, and the viewer strains to see what
it is all about, but cannot. Yet he accepts this restraint, this
self-censorship, if you will, without complaint because it serves
to avoid delays at ball games. Yet we won't do the same when the
end is reducing the payoff for political murder.
If we did the same, the drama we would miss would no doubt be
riveting. Evil is riveting. From watching Hitchcock we know of
the perverse, and fully human, enjoyment that· comes from looking
evil dead in the eye. But when the evil is real and the suffering
actual, that enjoyment is tinged with shame, the kind of shame
one experiences when exposed to pornography.
And like porno
graphy, terrorist television, the graphic unfolding of evil on
camera, sells. During the hostage crisis, network news ratings
rose markedly. But this fascination has its price. Lot's wife
fixed her gaze £!! evil and turned to salt.
--
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told American lawyers meeting in
London on July 15 that means must be employed to "starve the terrorist and
hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend." The July 8 edi
tion of NEWSWEEK chipped in with a one-page media summation of its own,
titled "The Network Circus":