On balance and emotional distance

This week I interviewed Sherine Tadros, a British TV journalist who, as correspondent of Al Jazeera English, was the only Western journalist in Gaza during the January war. Some of the points she made:

_ Journalistic balance is a useless concept in covering a war that itself is not balanced in any meaningful way. Giving equal airtime to the parties or trying to artificially balance the story is bad journalism when most of the destruction and death happens on one side. That is, when most of the story happens on one side. What a journalist must do is try and be fair. That is, provide the context plus give both sides the opportunity to present their views. This means that a story is fair even if most or almost all of your reporting is going to be about Gaza as long as you get Mark Regev or some other Israeli official on air to comment on the story. Putting a TV team in Sderot to report every day on the Palestinian rockets that caused miniscule damage compared to the death raining down on Gaza is bad journalism because it misses the real story, which is Gaza.

_ Reporting a story like the war in Gaza in an emotional way is OK. How else are you going to tell the story of a boy who spent days in the company of his dead mother and brother? The story itself is emotional and if you present it with a stone-cold face, you are missing the point.

_ The best way of not missing this point is to live the story yourself. Sherine certainly did, having lived through the entire war, narrowly escaping death at least on one occasion. You have to really feel the victims and their experience in order to tell their story well.

Read the whole interview in next week's Magyar Narancs (in Hungarian).