Victim broadcasting sends interviewers equipped with trauma-seeking devices to scoop up the afflicted just long enough for the sound-bite and the picture. Then they dump the victims faster than the crews can pack up their equipment. We've grown so used to this process that "real" and "true" stories of people's suffering scarcely seem "real" or "true" anymore. Whether it's on TV, radio or in print, it's all emotional pornography.
As I write, it is Wednesday morning, Marian Finucane is on the radio and I am hearing the voices of Bernadette and Michael Rushe, the sister and father of the Irish soldier injured in the Lebanon, Pte Ronnie Rushe. They are spilling their feelings over the airwaves as they prepare to fly to Pte Rushe's bedside. The family are dignified in their grief, having recently lost their mother and wife. But I can't help asking: why this exposure of their most intimate lives? No one has forced them to speak. Perhaps they find it therapeutic to know that the public cares to hear how they feel.
For the listener, it is depressing and voyeuristic, rather than informative. After the Rushe item, a listener calls the programme to question the value of exposing the family in this way. Finucane defends the item, saying that "we should cover the human side of it as well as the statistical side. . . Pte Ronnie Rushe was an unknown statistic until we heard about Pte Ronnie Rushe as a human being. . . You have to report the human side or else you are living in a world of boys' comics and militaristic language."
Her argument is compelling, but not convincing. If we must hear their grief in order to feel empathy for Rushe and his family, what does that say about the quality of our compassion? A climate of victim radio has taken hold in the Republic, which has largely resisted the exploitation of TV programmes such as Sally Jesse Raphael (Sky One), where the panellists are followed backstage by cameras so that we can see their most private moments. Counsellors hang over the panelists' shoulders like revivalist preachers, pummelling them with advice; the producers seek to justify the emotional pornography by claiming that they are teaching us lessons which will make us better people.
In this atmosphere of emotional rather than objective journalism, Irish journalists have had a clear choice: do we go the way of the US and British tabloids and pump the public for shock value, seeking out trauma for trauma's sake? Or do we limit coverage of traumatic experiences to certain, responsible contexts, which give them moral value? This was the dilemma faced by Susan Dennehy (28) and Leona Cully (29), two independent producers who have just made their first radio series, In the Company of Women (RTE Radio 1, Mondays, 3.22 p.m.) Commissioned by RTE Radio's director of programmes, Helen Shaw, for the Life and Living afternoon slot. The four-part series allows women to tell their most intimate stories.
Dennehy and Cully say they were motivated by their frustration with the lack of representation of women on radio and also with the tendency to have women - when they were heard - "moaning" and "griping". "We wanted to try to bring up issues and a context for women's stories without being preachy," says Cully. In a media dominated by cynics, the pair dared to take "inspiration" rather than titillation as their objective. The pair came to radio with none of the usual journalistic agendas and assumptions, which is refreshing.
Dennehy is a producer of animated films and Cully is a budding novelist. In the Company of Women began last Monday afternoon with three first-person accounts which, if presented in a different light, could have been sensationalist. In particular, there was the voice of Grainne, a young Northern lesbian describing how she discovered she was gay; how and why she "came out" to her mother and how people react to her now.
You can imagine what could have been done to churn that story for every last salacious detail. Dennehy and Cully simply let Grainne tell her story gently. Grainne had tried to submerge her teenage crushes on other women by having boyfriends, eventually settling down with one man. On the day they were moving into a new apartment as a committed heterosexual couple, Grainne passed one of their new female neighbours on the stairs and fell in love. Soon, Grainne had broken up with her boyfriend, whom she still regrets having hurt, and moved in with the lesbian neighbour. When she eventually told her mother the truth, her mother replied that she had known all along: "a mother always knows her own daughter."
Grainne's story wasn't simply about lesbianism. It was about being true to yourself, no matter how difficult that may be, and about being honest with your family even at the risk of rejection. By refusing to sensationalise these stories, Dennehy and Cully ran the risk of mundanity. Quite the opposite happened. Because they did not feel threatened, the subjects told their stories in an honest, relaxed way.
There was no editorial intrusion, although occasionally an expert contributed to the narrative to give global context to the women's experiences. The women were light of heart because they were talking about their experiences with the wisdom of hindsight. This wasn't smash and grab journalism. Such a considered approach requires a greater attentiveness on the part of the listener, but the act of listening carefully made you feel closer to the subjects than if their stories had been rammed over your head in tabloid fashion.
People's stories need to be told in a responsible way - as In the Company of Women demonstrates. There is nothing more subversive than an individual's story when it highlights hypocrisy, bad social policy, inequality and economic exploitation. If you dare to be unfashionably idealistic - as Dennehy and Cully are - an individual's personal account can be "inspirational". That in itself is worth celebrating because there are fewer and fewer broadcasting organisations left in the Western world where they would be allowed to do it.
In the Company of Women is on RTE Radio 1, Mondays, 3.22 p.m.