It was an abiding moment of the Arab Spring. As Colonel Gaddafi’s mauled corpse was paraded through the streets of Sirte, al-Jazeera cut to what it described as ‘wild street celebrations in Tripoli’. The screen showed a dusty compound, with three blokes lolling around a burned-out car, diffidently firing pistols into the air; a stray dog entered stage right, sloped-off towards the car and then disappeared from view. Chris Morris could not have surpassed the sequence; it was beyond parody.
The memory of this scene re-entered my mind yesterday evening, when I visited Sky News’ ‘A Year on the Frontline’ exhibition at Somerset House. No one would doubt the bravery of the correspondents and their teams; but, as I saw each still photograph and watched each report, I felt that I was being subtly manipulated.
Archive material has been presented as an authority on past events, not just an eyewitness to them. This approach might reflect a change in the structure of rolling news coverage: this is what’s happening; here is what’s very likely to happen in consequence.
But war, and the reporting of war, is not that coherent, not that neat. Soon I began to recall bulletins that confidently predicted Gaddafi’s imminent demise, only for his forces to advance 100 miles the following day. And I remembered hearing that the rebels would take many more months to topple the regime, only for…The rest, as they say, is history — or at least a history that is yet to be written.
What this show can do, which a history could not, is to convey the political power of captivating images. The footage of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, dressed as a Savile Row dandy, wagging his finger at the revolting Benghazis and vowing to hunt them down, was a stark reminder of the West’s recent complicity in Gaddafi’s tyranny, while photographs of charred bones on the floor of a Tripoli warehouse indicted that same complicity. The show also engages with the moral question of displaying violent and distressing images, in a sequence of interviews with editors and reporters who leave you in little doubt of their importance.
‘A Year on the Frontline’ merits a visit — you can be in and out in 15 minutes, or you can linger for longer and marvel at the possibilities and durability of modern technology. But, if you want an account of the Arab Spring, you’d best wait for a book that explains why and how dictators fell — and how and why others persist.
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