Something else I’ve learned about journalism: empathy is very powerful. Everyone wants to be understood. Literally everyone, even psychopaths and terrorists. Doesn’t mean you have to sympathize with them, but the best reporting tries to make sense of all kinds of human behavior.
People have strong reactions to the idea of empathizing with criminals and terrorists. Again, empathy is not sympathy. To accurately portray people who do evil things, you have to first see them as humans existing within a context. We can’t prevent behavior we don’t understand.
It’s very understandable to want to dehumanize people who do inhuman things. But they are human, whether we like it or not, and thinking of them as animals robs us of opportunities to learn about the circumstances that produce those kinds of people and how to stop them.
