The Big City

I was mixing a programme for a slot called Analysis on World Service radio last week. The programme was written by a BBC Correspondent called Kim Ghattas who works in the Middle East and it was about the changing security situation in Saudi Arabia. The programme opened with Kim saying “Two years ago, on the streets of Rijad, a westerner pleaded for his life as he was hunted down by a militant linked to Al Qayda.” She had sent us a sound recording of the man being killed. It had the phasing, edgy quality of poorly recorded camcorder audio that’s been recompressed too many times, but you could clearly hear someone shouting ‘no, no’ and then several gunshots. I mixed it so that it started underneath her last few words and then became clearly audible for the shouting and the first gunshot, then it faded down again under her next bit of script. Have a listen to the final result - Ghattas- Saudi killing

At the time I was thinking that this was pretty strong stuff but it seemed justified by the short duration and the context. She was talking about that particular murder, not using the sound to illustrate a general point, and although it was quite shocking I wouldn’t describe it as a graphic depiction of the murder nor would I say it was being used gratuitously. Here is what the BBC editorial guidlines say about the subject.

We will always need to consider carefully the editorial justification for portraying graphic material of human suffering and distress. There are almost no circumstances in which it is justified to show executions and very few circumstances in which it is justified to broadcast other scenes in which people are being killed. It is always important to respect the privacy and dignity of the dead. We should never show them gratuitously. We should also avoid the gratuitous use of close ups of faces and serious injuries or other violent material.

Yesterday I found out that one of the producers in the Newsroom had cut the start of the programme off because he thought it was too disturbing. He told me “We don’t do that sort of thing.”

This is why I sometimes wish that I worked for Al Jazeera. There are too many people in BBC News who feel that their job is to impartially and accurately report what is going on and that’s all there is to it. They don’t feel that they need to excite their audience, to sell the stories, to make people say “Wow!” I think they’re complacent. It is a privilege to be given access to the 42 million people who regularly listen to the World Service in English. Some of the things we have to talk about aren’t very nice. Some of the things we have to say aren’t very interesting. In both cases we have to be creative in order to encourage people to understand the complexity of the stories we’re covering. We have to be engaging and sometimes that might mean being shocking, sometimes it might mean being silly. But being boring, there’s no excuse for that.