What do you say to someone in a refugee camp who spots an American journalist and starts to remove their bandages because they assume you want to take a grisly photo of the wound? Sometimes, doing journalism can feel like shopping at a misery bazaar. The best journalists avoid disaster porn (Katherine Boo is a legend) but still, reporting from a poor country that is known for suffering can create a kind of pressure. People (readers) expect a certain level of pain and exceptional woe. It wasn’t until I reported the story that became our first Rough Translation pilot that I realized just how much this expectation of pain from foreign places can warp reality. Our own empathy radar is being tracked by our story subjects and can alter the stories people present.
The Congo We Listen To is about a young journalist, Laura Heaton, who discovers that a mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo that made headlines around the world may never have happened. After Laura publishes her findings, she gets an attacking email from the playwright and activist formerly known as Eve Ensler, now known as V. The story unfolds some complicated and sensitive dynamics that I just knew I couldn’t unpack in the tight frame of an NPR news mag. I was glad to have this new podcast to put it in.
The Financial Times would later call us “sensitive and subtle,” but subtlety makes me nervous on sensitive topics. Would listeners of our new show understand what we were doing? Did we? We wanted to show that we weren’t casting doubt on womens’ stories of rape, but shedding light on our own complicity as consumers of foreign news. Readers’ appetite for simple truths made it easier to feed them lies.
I figured no one would understand what we were doing, and the show would get cancelled. Instead, the episode won awards and I felt like I finally had an audio home. That was a good feeling. So for today’s audio clip, I want to highlight a moment from that story, where V, then known as Eve, warns Laura about the fickleness of foreign donors and the need to tell them simple stories. The clip begins with Laura reading her email aloud.
The Market for Your Empathy
“What Rough Translation episode has meant something to you? Send me a voice memo and we may use it on the show.”
Where can we send these voice memos?
“We wanted to show that we weren’t casting doubt on womens’ stories of rape, but shedding light on our own complicity as consumers of foreign news.”
I believe that’s what you achieved with this episode. That’s certainly what I remember thinking about it at the time when I listened to the episode