War Journalism Should Be Rooted in Empathy — Not Violence | Bel Trew | TED

If you load up my social
media feed right now

it&amp;#39;s like experiencing frighteningly
different alternate universes.

the extremists, those people, I would say,

everyday, normal people’s experiences
of major world news events

it would make you question
if there is a reality at all.

We live in a world where there are
1,001 ways to communicate,

and yet we&amp;#39;ve completely forgotten
how to speak to each other.

As a journalist, I&amp;#39;m among the few people

who really can
and should talk to all sides.

That irreverence where I can chat
to a fighter on the frontlines in Libya,

but also march into a presidential
office in Kyiv demanding answers,

I guess you could call me
an accidental war correspondent.

I don&amp;#39;t really like the phrase
war correspondent,

as I think it&amp;#39;s a bit dehumanizing,

but it&amp;#39;s the quickest way
to explain what I do.

And it’s accidental because honestly,
I’m really frightened on frontlines.

And I&amp;#39;m also really terrible
at identifying military hardware.

There&amp;#39;s a running joke that journalists
think everything is a tank.

But the region where I was born,
the region I grew up in,

and the region I
specialized in, the Middle East

particularly after that beautiful
explosion of hope

with the 2011 uprisings was largely stolen
by authoritarian regimes.

Since then, my scope has widened
to include conflicts like Ukraine,

as the tectonic plates
of global politics have shifted.

probably quite a unique spectrum of sides,

that X and Meta are desperate
to funnel us into.

and that division
is more violent than ever.

And that division is so fundamental,
it&amp;#39;s almost existential.

One person&amp;#39;s perception of reality
cannot exist alongside someone else&amp;#39;s.

Genocidal language is being bandied around

To borrow a phrase from a colleague
who I deeply respect,

who was a journalist for many years
and now works in disinformation,

what we&amp;#39;re seeing right now
is the total collapse of discourse.

for any breakdown
in societal communication

I&amp;#39;m not entirely sure what everyone means
by the mainstream media.

I know that I&amp;#39;m frequently
accused of being it,

which, I guess is kind of
flattering, right?

responsible for every major
media outlet on the planet.

But although I&amp;#39;d like to defend
my compromised profession,

there might be a tiny
nugget of truth in it.

And that truth might just
be key to fixing this.

I’ve been covering Europe’s
bloodiest war in generations:

when the Russians withdrew
from around the capital, Kyiv,

After a pretty horrendous
day of reporting,

we stumbled upon the body
of a young Ukrainian man.

He&amp;#39;d been bound,
he&amp;#39;d been shot in the back,

and his body had been dumped
by this abandoned Russian camp.

We spent a year trying to find out
who he was, what happened to him,

we uncovered a devastating part
that plagues every conflict.

The desperate search
for the missing and for the dead.

During the course of filming
this investigation,

which became my first
feature-length documentary,

&amp;quot;The Body in the Woods,&amp;quot;

we met a teenage boy, a Ukrainian
teenage boy called Vladislav.

Vladislav&amp;#39;s mother, his only parent,

as she tried to deliver
humanitarian aid outside of Kyiv.

Vladislav was desperately looking
for her body, and in fact,

he&amp;#39;d actually been given the wrong
corpse to cremate at one point.

he moved in with his lawyer,
who was helping him in the quest.

All he had left were a few belongings
and a pet hedgehog.

The reason I&amp;#39;m telling you this today

is because when we did
the initial first screening,

was that while this was definitely
a documentary about war,

there wasn’t a single image
of a frontline trench in it.

In fact, the only videos
of tanks and soldiers 

appeared at the beginning
when we were setting the scene.

We had that footage
from our own reporting,

We had the footage
of incoming projectiles,

of frontline artillery positions,
but for whatever reason,

it had ended up on the cutting-room floor.

Article by AI based on youtube video transcript: War Journalism Should Be Rooted in Empathy — Not Violence | Bel Trew | TED

Summary by AI based on youtube video transcript

Article by AI based on youtube video transcript

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