Transcript: How to process the news when it all feels bad

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘How to process the news when it all feels bad’

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life & Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos. On this podcast, we mostly focus on cultural topics that are relatively pleasant. Movies and books. Sometimes we talk about things like managing time, but it’s always in service of helping listeners make time for the things that they find rewarding. The thing we’re often thinking about here is how to live a good life.

But life isn’t always good. And the news cycle over the past few months has felt relentless and hard. Israel’s war in Gaza can seem unresolvable. Russia’s war in Ukraine, two years in, is still going strong. There’s a lot of anxiety about the future. It’s easy for things to feel worse than ever. Darker. More unknown. My colleague Alec Russell is the FT’s foreign editor, and he’s just one of the wisest people that I know at finding perspective in the face of atrocities. He recently wrote a piece commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Rwanda genocide, which he reported on in the 90s. And he’s here with us today to talk through some of these questions. Alec, hi. Welcome to the show.

Alec Russell
Oh, Lilah. Hello. Very good to be back on the show.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s really, really, really nice to have you. So I thought maybe we could start by telling listeners a little bit about your background. I think a lot about how you were really, like, at a lot of turning points in history. You were in Romania after the Berlin Wall fell under Ceaușescu. You were in South Africa during the fall of apartheid. You were in Rwanda. This is a big question to start with. But I’m curious if being in the middle of these conflicts ever made you feel despair.

Alec Russell
In some of them, yes. And I think two in particular, Yugoslavia, which had this awful, awful civil war from ’92 to ’95 and then Rwanda in ’94, where there was the world’s worst genocide since the Holocaust. And I think it was hard to report on those two crises, conflicts, atrocities, nightmares, without losing faith in humanity, actually.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. You know, I am asking partially because I think a lot of people are having a hard time coping right now. Of course, most people listening aren’t seeing first-hand sort of the wars that are happening. But you open up Instagram and you see bodies in Gaza. And then next to that is an ad for overalls. And it all can feel really quite bad and disorienting. And what I think is hardest to make sense of is whether things are really, actually worse now, or even just how to place these things that we’re seeing.

Alec Russell
Well, I think you make an incredibly important point by talking about the role of social media. I’ve been thinking about this recently, actually, because I was thinking, what would have happened in the 90s, in the mid-90s, in these terrible conflicts in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, if there’d been TikTok and if the awful images had been relayed into everyone’s lives via their smartphones. Then actually, I think the world in one way or another would have intervened in Rwanda very rapidly and ended it. All that said, TikTok and other, social media, they make these terrible, terrible conflicts that are raging now much more present in people’s lives. And so, yes, I would argue ultimately a good thing because it means that it’s much harder for the world to avert its gaze.

But of course, it’s difficult for individuals because most people can’t really do anything about it. It is, as a result, tempting to imagine that the world is in a worse place than it’s been in decades. I’m not sure if that’s helpful, actually. One, because it’s probably not true, but I don’t think it really matters. The fact of the matter is, there are these awful, awful wars, these two ones in particular. But there’s a third one, Sudan, that gets very little attention now from the world’s media because everyone’s focused on Gaza and Ukraine.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. You’re talking about the ongoing civil war. It started about a year ago, now. I think you’re totally right that it’s getting less attention. You know, it feels like there’s so much injustice and atrocity. There’s those two wars at top of mind. Then there’s Sudan and there’s Yemen and Iran and Afghanistan and the Uyghurs. And then in our backyards, there’s stuff. I mean, we have a lot of problems in New York. It’s easy to feel now that it’s sort of everything, everywhere, all at once.

Alec Russell
Yes. I think we should be wary of thinking of the world in that way. It’s always been a messy place. I mean, what struck me on thinking back about the mid-90s was . . . Oh, yeah, but this is the decade that we now look back on as being this rosy, post-fall of the Berlin Wall decade when the world was hopeful and we all thought that democracy was on the march and so on.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Alec Russell
And that’s not really the case. There was all sorts of terrible things that were happening then.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Alec, I would love to talk with you about the piece you just wrote for the FT about the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. You were in Kigali in 1994. Can you tell me a little bit about how you ended up there?

Alec Russell
Yes. The Rwandan genocide broke out in early April 1994. When it broke out, I and much of the rest of the world’s media, was hundreds of miles to the south in South Africa. Reporting on this great story of hope, which was the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela, and I must confess. I and I think most of my colleagues paid zero attention to what was going on in Rwanda. There were a handful of very brave journalists who went around reporting on these appalling massacres and what increasingly became clear was a genocide. But it was eclipsed as a news story, I’m afraid to say, by what was happening in South Africa. So I was late to go to Rwanda, as were many of my colleagues. The genocide took place over 100 days from April 7th through to early July, in which 750- . . . 800,000 people were killed.

When I arrived in Kigali, Kigali had been recently liberated from the extremist government, which had been overseeing the massacres, to sue the government of the majority ethnic grouping, the Hutus. And this new, government had taken over, a rebel force was in charge and they were trying to clean up the city. And it was a horrible, horrible, ghastly mission of clearing up bodies and burying them and cleaning up this devastated city. So it was a, really, you really felt that you were kind of in the recesses of the sewers of the worst of what humanity can do, actually.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Wow. And we should say that Rwanda was the subject of a number of lawsuits in the International Criminal Court, and a number of the perpetrators of these crimes were brought to justice, which was unique. But you talk in your piece about how actually the aftermath has been pretty fraught politically.

Alec Russell
Yes. It’s quite a dilemma, really, because this new government that took power, they inherited a charnel house. And I think the country did need then a strong hand at the tiller. The country had been all but destroyed, and there was no trust between Hutus and Tutsis. Unfortunately, 30 years on, that same government is still in charge and is running a very authoritarian regime. And I say unfortunately, because, well, one, it’s very tough for those who disagree with it. Very, very tough. But it’s also trampled on the dreams of some back in 1994 who hoped that somehow a new government could be formed that was genuinely multi-ethnic and would oversee a new, tolerant and harmonious society.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
One of the reasons I’ve wanted to talk to you about this, Alec, is because as foreign editor, I think of it as part of your job to give weight and perspective to things going on around the world. Is that fair to say?

Alec Russell
Hey, it is fair. It is fair. Mercifully, I don’t have to think about it too much because I’ve got lots of great colleagues who do it all naturally for the FT from their vantage points around the world. But I guess that is our mission. It’s the filter that we try to provide.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And how do you do that? Like, how do you feel about how to allocate your attention? I mean, this is maybe not the right way to ask it, but do you think about death tolls, the number of people who are dying in certain places. Do you think about the potential of a conflict to be even bigger?

Alec Russell
Death tolls . . . Traditionally there’s that cliché of once of newspapers now, of news organisations: If it bleeds, it leads. Well, leaving aside what a caricature that is, of course it’s not actually very helpful. Look, for example, at what’s going on in Ukraine at the moment. In recent weeks, there’ve been a series of missile attacks on Ukraine by Russia. Now, in some of these bombardment, not that many people have been killed. So sometimes you can read of this bombardment of Ukraine and it says five people killed and ten wounded. If you go by the death toll alone, you might think, ah well, I’m really sorry for the for the families appalled for the families and friends of the victims. But five people might die in a car accident or something, so that doesn’t seem too significant.

But of course, that’s totally wrong, because what you’re talking about is you’re talking about a country that is just in thrall to the potential of being hit by a missile during the night. I mean, if you were living in New York and you knew that that night a dozen cruise missiles might come in on the city, would you be reassured if you’re told, yeah, but there won’t be that many people killed. Maybe five people, maybe 15. The whole of New York would be either leaving New York or whatever.

So I think that I think the death toll is (inaudible) but it is a sort of pretty blunt gauge of the weight and importance of a story. And yet, you know, you look at the relentless figures from Gaza and actually the death toll really tells you something about the story. Many of these people being killed in Gaza are civilians. This is, you know, this is a terrible, terrible thing that’s unfolding there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I would like to ask you specifically about Palestine, because it’s a hard one to talk about. It’s a hard one to know how to gauge, you know. Of course, it’s hard to talk about Israel without either being accused of antisemitism or actually veering into it because of how linked Israel is to the Jewish people. And it feels to me that that makes this conflict feel harder because it’s touchy and people are struggling to figure out how to speak openly about it or how to make it better. And so it can feel a little like a black hole.

Alec Russell
I, well, you’re right, of course. It does pose particular challenges for commentary and analysis for all sorts of very obvious historical reasons. Israel coming into being from the ashes of the Holocaust. And this particular, this latest war in Gaza and bout of fighting in Gaza, it comes off the back of one of the most appalling terrorist atrocities. I’m thinking of October the 7th last year.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah, I think going back to, you know, our discussion about social media, it’s a very strange, sort of disorienting time to be watching these wars on social media. It seems like it’s created, especially with Gaza, quite an odd conversation where many people feel the news they’re getting on the war can feel too cautious, or the response from politicians can feel too cautious. But then to fill the gap you’re seeing, you know, raw footage from Gaza reposted by celebrities. And I don’t know, I mean, as you’re looking through your sort of feed, you’re thinking, do I want to be getting my news from Susan Sarandon? It’s really just, it can feel like you’re kind of floating.

Alec Russell
Well, sometimes, I mean, it’s just going to sound like a strange thing for me to say as a journalist who works for, dare I say it, a great international news organisation that believes in judgment and balance and fairness and getting the facts right and so on. For all that, I do think that there is a place in the dissemination of news for celebrities sometimes. I mean, it’s going to sound shocking, but sometimes they have the ability to reach many more people by delivering a direct statement than the great news organisations.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. So I mean, is there a case to be made — before I go into my kind of last question — is there a case to be made for the fact that, like, it being a confusing time right now for people on social media is maybe OK? Because it’s confusing anyway. You know, if you’re getting your news from a number of people and opinions from another people, number of people, and that can feel . . . Like it makes it hard to gauge. It’s . . . . . Yeah, it’s OK to be sort of wading through it . . . 

Alec Russell
It is OK. It is OK to be confused. And it is understandable if you are distressed by the state of the world. For me, people being confused and distressed is a better state than people just switching off and going, nah, no interest. I won’t stop booking my holiday. I do believe that the media, when it does a good job in highlighting terrible things, it can encourage governments to raise their heads from their own domestic difficulties, to think about what’s happening in the world and try and work out a policy that helps alleviate suffering.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
Well, it leads to my last question nicely, which is, while we are feeling that confusion and distress, I guess, how do we have hope? You know, you have seen some of these horrible things first-hand and you’ve seen how history remembers them years later. How do you hold those two things, the kind of concern for the present, but also hope seeing what you’ve seen?

Alec Russell
Well, of course, it’s sort of implicitly ludicrous for me to start talking about hope in the same sentence as talking about a genocide in the case of Rwanda.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Alec Russell
But in the aftermath of what happened in Rwanda, one of the heartening developments was the accelerated development of international justice. So there was a war-crimes tribunal set up a specifically for Rwanda after the genocide. And bit by bit, it, identified suspects and it charged suspects and it tried suspects. And 61 people were convicted in the Rwandan war crimes tribunal, some of them for genocide. These were the first people to be convicted of genocide since the Genocide Convention of 1948, which was set up to try and ensure that something like the Holocaust could never happen again. So I know 61 people would not seem like a lot of people to be convicted for a genocide, but it was really, really important. It was a huge, stepping stone on the road to international justice for war crimes and genocide.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So Alec it sounds like part of what you’re saying is that however horrible the crisis is in front of us, it’s worth it to push for justice.

Alec Russell
Absolutely. I think you have to hang on to that. And it’s right to believe in it. I closed the essay I wrote for the FT Weekend on Rwanda with the following words. I wrote, “Sometimes the mills of justice do grind fine.” And I believe in that. And I think that it is something that one can cling to. There will be a world where the perpetrators of war crimes in Ukraine will be brought to book. There is, evidence has been accumulated and it will happen probably only in a post-Putin world. But I think it will happen. As to what’s going on in Gaza now, and also, of course, looking back to the atrocities of October the 7th, well, the quest for justice there will be very, very fraught. And it’s hard to see how it will happen right now, but I think it will. I think it will.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Alec, this was so helpful, so clarifying and such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Alec Russell
Lilah, great to be on the show and a special request. Next time we’re going to talk about something really uplifting and fun.

Lilah Raptopoulos
We’ll talk about a movie.

Alec Russell
Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Perfect. Thank you. Alec.

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That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life & Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have included Alec’s essay on Rwanda and all links that go to the FT from the show notes get you past the paywall. Also in the show notes is a very exciting link to buy tickets to the US FT Weekend Festival in Washington DC. That’s on Saturday, May 4th at the Reach at the Kennedy Center. It’s full of really wonderful panels and talks. Alec will be there. I will be there. Nancy Pelosi will be there. It’s going to be great. And selfishly, I’d just love to meet you. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Zach St Louis is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Monday.