Looking Evil Dead in the Eye

By Charles Krauthammer

The problem of evil has long been the province of philosophy. Philosophy is not particularly interested in that question anymore. (Nor is the world much interested in philosophy, but that is another matter.) Journalism has taken up the slack. Unfortunately, journalism 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 Osaka, Japan, where reporters and photographers stood around while two men broke into the apartment of an accused swindler, murdered him with 13 bayonet stabs, then emerged blood splattered to a press corps stunned, but not too stunned to keep the TV cameras rolling. It led to West Germany, where a couple of magazines, Bunte Illustrierte and Stern, tried to auction off to other media bits of Mengele, photographs, letters and other memorabilia. Finally, it led to Beirut, where during 17 days of astonishing symbiosis, television and terrorists co- produced -- there is no better word -- a hostage drama.

For journalism, as for the other performing arts, evil is a fascinating and indispensable subject. The question is how to fix on the subject without merging with it. For many arts, the solution is to interpose time: their reflections on evil are, for the most part, recollections in tranquillity. On television news, that protective distance disappears.

No event has demonstrated the bizarre consequences of that fact quite as dramatically as the TWA hijacking. There, under laboratory conditions, journalism met terror, in a pure culture, uncontaminated by civilization. The results are not encouraging. Terror needed a partner in crime to give the event life. The media, television above all, obliged.

Driven not by malevolence but by those 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.

As a result, others ask the question and produce a depressingly familiar list of findings: insensitivity to the families; exploitation of the hostages; absurd, degrading deference to jailers; interference with diplomacy; appropriation of the role of negotiator. (David Hartman to Nabih Berri: "Any final words to President Reagan this morning?") And finally, giving over the airwaves to people whose claim to airtime is based entirely on the fact that they are forcibly holding innocent Americans.

The principal defense against these charges is perhaps best called the cult of objectivity. Journalists are led to believe, and some may actually believe, that they only hold a mirror to life. And mirrors can hardly be accused of bad faith. After all, the idea of neutrality inheres in the very word medium. There is a story out there to be got, and as Sam Donaldson, prominent preacher of this doctrine, puts it, "It's our job to cover the story . . . we bring information."

Not even physicists, practitioners of a somewhat more exact science, have so arrogant a belief in the out there. For 60 years, physics has learned to live with its Uncertainty Principle: that the act of observing an event alters its nature. Journalism continues to resist the idea. And journalism, which shines lights at people, not electrons, does more than alter. It creates. First, out of the infinite flotsam of "events" out there, it makes "stories." Then, by exposing them (and their attached people, ideas, crimes), it puts them on the map. "As seen on TV" gives substance to murder as surely as it does to Ginzu knives. The parade of artifacts is varied, but the effect is the same: coverage makes them real.

No one knows this better than terrorists. No one is more grudging in acknowledging this than television journalists. Their self-criticism takes place generally at the periphery. For example, the TV anchors were much embarrassed that reporters' unruliness caused the first hostage press conference to be temporarily called off. (By terrorists, mind you.) But that misses the point. The real point is what they were doing when not unruly: blanketing American airwaves with shows choreographed by the captors, with the hostages, under constant but concealed threat, acting as their spokesmen.

Another fine point was whether to run live pictures. Dan Rather said no, averring that his network would not be handed over to terrorists. This was in contrast to ABC, which had broadcast live interviews. But what purpose does it serve to broadcast these interviews at all? If the purpose is to show that the hostages are alive and well, the tools of the print media -- a still picture and a summary of what had happened -- are perfectly adequate. But that would be bad television. And that is exactly the point: the play's the thing. These terrorist productions are coveted for their dramatic, not their news value.

That realization might open the way to some solution, or at least some approach to the problem of reducing terrorist control of the airwaves. If much of the coverage is indeed not news but entertainment -- bizarre guerrilla theater that outdoes Network -- then television might quite properly place voluntary limits on it, as it does on other entertainments.

Broadcast television imposes limits, strict but self-enforced limits, on explicit sex. Why not on explicit terror? There is no reason why all the news of a terrorist event, like news of a rape, cannot be transmitted in some form. But in the interest of decency, diplomacy and our own self-respect, it need not be live melodrama.

A few years ago, when some publicity seekers started dashing onto baseball fields during televised games, TV producers decided to discourage 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 pornography, 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 on evil and turned to salt.