If you load up my social media feed right now and give it a quick scroll, it's like experiencing frighteningly different alternate universes. Even if you weed out the trolls, the extremists, those people, I would say, who cling to the extremes of reality, everyday, normal people’s experiences of major world news events are so frighteningly different, 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've completely forgotten how to speak to each other.
As a journalist, I'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, is what drew me to this job. I guess you could call me an accidental war correspondent. I don't really like the phrase war correspondent, as I think it's a bit dehumanizing, but it's the quickest way to explain what I do. And it’s accidental because honestly, I’m really frightened on frontlines. And I'm also really terrible at identifying military hardware. There's a running joke that journalists think everything is a tank. It's kind of true.
(Laughter)
But the region where I was born, the region I grew up in, and the region I specialized in, the Middle East has been ravished by war, 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. And so, in many ways, I see a really wide spectrum of sides, probably quite a unique spectrum of sides, that transcends those echo chambers that X and Meta are desperate to funnel us into. And what I'm seeing right now is more division among people than ever, and that division is more violent than ever. And that division is so fundamental, it's almost existential. One person's perception of reality cannot exist alongside someone else's. Whole communities are being otherized. Genocidal language is being bandied around like people are using song lyrics. 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're seeing right now is the total collapse of discourse.
Now the first group to be blamed for any breakdown in societal communication is usually the mainstream media. I'm not entirely sure what everyone means by the mainstream media. I know that I'm frequently accused of being it, like it's a cartoon villain, which, I guess is kind of flattering, right? Little old me, Bel Trew, responsible for every major media outlet on the planet. But although I'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'd like to tell you a story. For the last two years, I’ve been covering Europe’s bloodiest war in generations: Ukraine. In April 2022, when the Russians withdrew from around the capital, Kyiv, my teams and I went up there. After a pretty horrendous day of reporting, we stumbled upon the body of a young Ukrainian man. He'd been bound, he'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, what happened to his family. And in the process, 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, "The Body in the Woods," we met a teenage boy, a Ukrainian teenage boy called Vladislav. Vladislav's mother, his only parent, had been shot dead by Russian soldiers as she tried to deliver humanitarian aid outside of Kyiv. Vladislav was desperately looking for her body, and in fact, he'd actually been given the wrong corpse to cremate at one point. Orphaned and alone, 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'm telling you this today is because when we did the initial first screening, the first feedback we got 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, from our own archives. We had the footage of incoming projectiles, of frontline artillery positions, but for whatever reason, it had ended up on the cutting-room floor. Subconsciously, we'd realized that the most impactful way to show the devastation of war was in the image of a teenage boy, his hedgehog and his heartbreak. Powerful war reporting didn’t need to constantly frontload violence.
The 24-hour news cycle that we have pinging relentlessly into our phones was really born in, and because of war. I think it's interesting that the first dedicated 24-hours-a-day news network, the first global one, CNN, really cemented its name in 1990 with its on-the-ground coverage of the first Gulf War. Al Jazeera Arabic rose to global prominence with its coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Now I think if I was to ask all of you today to imagine what war reporting looks like, you'd probably conjure up an image of someone in a helmet, a flak jacket, maybe dodging out of the way of an incoming projectile, an image that often becomes the story and even the headline. But if you think about that for a second, that doesn't really go beyond visualizing the dictionary definition of war.
Now don’t get me wrong, this is an incredibly important part of war to show, but I worry if it drowns out, if it dominates other sides of conflicts, like the devastating impact on civilians whose lives are upended, who lose their loved ones, who have to live with life-shattering injuries, then maybe it tips into the fetishization of violence. I think part of the problem might be the historical patriarchal structures within the news industry, which still [is] a little bit present today. Breaking news, there are female war correspondents. There are even women editors-in-chief. But to me, it's not about what gender you identify as, but how we as journalists perceive and communicate what we see. And so often frontline coverage has been quite macho. In fact, for a long time, it was known in the industry as the “bang bang.” The bang bang. What a phrase, right? Some of the most devastating moments in human history, reduced to the literal sound of the murderous machines.
Of course, there are always human-interest news pieces, but in journalism, they're always called the softer stories, which puzzled me because sometimes, they're the most gut-wrenching part of any conflict. And I was really struggling with this. And what makes good journalism after a particularly tricky trip to Ukraine last year, where I just met so many families whose lives have been upended that I decided to print off a sticker and put it on my laptop, where it remains today. And that sticker reads Truth and Compassion. For so long, I've lived by the maxim "the truth will set you free." But as I went from horror to horror, from war to war, I realized that sometimes the truth was a bit blurry. And if we only peddle our own truths, we're in danger of not seeing all sides of the story, as difficult as it is sometimes to reach across that divide. And that's where we cycle back to the collapse of discourse.
Right now, any of you, without even turning on the news or opening a news channel or newspaper, you can access, from your mobile phones through social media, some of the most horrific images from world news events ever brewed in the darkest cauldron of the human psyche. And this has only been made worse by social media companies getting rid of their trust and safety divisions. It's really staggering to see what humans can do to humans. These days, I'm seeing on networks like Telegram, these videos being shared, and they're met with likes and smiley emojis and messages of encouragement. In the case of Ukraine, some of these videos that show the haunting, last moments of soldiers' lives as they're cowering in the trenches and you see that bird's-eye view of the grenade dropping on them. Some of those videos are shared on X to comic music.
Now it’s not the fault, of course, of conflict journalism. That's not the only reason that we got here. But I wonder if the history of bang bang journalism, if the entertainment of the news industry, if the pursuit of clicks and likes has in some way contributed. Of course, it's gone well beyond what any news agency can even stomach, let alone be held responsible for. The violence has morphed into our inability to hold our own pain and yet see the suffering of others. It has polarized all of us so much that we cannot imagine that there is another side to the story, let alone that there might be a humanity to it. It's a world where it becomes an extremist position to call for a deeply needed humanitarian ceasefire. It's a world where we have a broken discourse. But it's a world, maybe, where conflict journalism can step up.
For the last few months, and I'd like to share a few more stories, I've been covering the most bitterly divided war of our time, Gaza. This is the fourth war in Gaza that I've covered, although I should say that foreign correspondents are not permitted to be actually inside Gaza, apart from on-military embeds. So it's up to our brave Palestinian journalist colleagues who are spearheading the coverage at great risk to their own lives, from within Gaza. But if we go back a few months, in Israel, the horrors of Hamas's bloody rampage on October 7, spurred a lot of society to back the military offensive in Gaza. But what I learned when I was on the ground was that not everyone was behind it. I spoke to family members of those who've been held hostage in Gaza right now by militants. I spoke to family members of those who were killed on October 7, and some of them said to me that they didn't believe that a destruction and a collective punishment of Gaza would do any good. They said "not in my name," and some of them have joined protests calling for a ceasefire that are taking place in Tel Aviv right now, despite the fact that they're facing global criticism from people on their own side. There was one interview that struck me, was with a man called Yonatan, an Israeli man, and his mother had been killed on October 7. And this interview impacted me so much, I actually had to put my phone on mute because I needed to take a minute to breathe. Yonatan told me, "Vengeance is not a strategy. Violence will not fix violence. Invest in peace."
To experience such a searing level of pain, like to have your mother murdered, but yet to see the suffering of others, is the deepest well of compassion I feel that we can all learn from. It's a well of compassion that's perhaps needed right now, as the death toll is soaring in Gaza. As some of the world's most respected rights groups, like Save the Children, are saying, Palestinian civilians and children are being killed at a historic rate. And it is a deep well of compassion that I feel journalists could learn from to build a better journalism. A journalism that turns from the patriarchal tendencies to fetishize violence, that tells the true impact of war in and out of the trenches. A journalism that could go some way to helping us heal society. A journalism that might even be able to help fix this broken discourse.
I'm talking to you like I'm the Mother Teresa of journalism, right? Like I haven’t put on a helmet and a flak jacket and stood repeatedly in front of a camera and talked about the bombs landing all around me. Like me and my editors haven't messed up news coverage choices and watched with horror the weaponization of words. I don't know what to say to you all today, I know I can and will do better. I know that we, the journalists, the storytellers, with our platforms, can help put us on a better path. I know that we, the viewers and the readers, with our ability to direct news coverage through our consumption, can help put us on a better course. It's why I won't take this sticker off my laptop, so it reminds me every day. And it's why I will continue to shout from the rooftops.
Only truth and compassion together can set us free.
Thank you.
(Applause)
