I'm Alan Little and here on the BBC World Service, we're looking at what makes good journalism

and asking what even the best journalism can really achieve.

In the year before she died in 2004, the writer, philosopher and activist, Susan Sontag,

published an essay focusing on war photography.

These dead are supremely uninterested in the living, in those who took their lives,

in witnesses and in us.

Why should they seek our gaze?

What would they have to say to us?

Here she was reading from her essay entitled, Regarding the Pain of Others.

We, this we as everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through,

we don't understand, we don't get it, we truly can't imagine what it was like, we can't imagine

how dreadful, how terrifying war is and how normal it becomes, can't understand, can't imagine.

That's what every soldier, every journalist, an aid worker and independent observer who has put

in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby stubbornly

feels and they are right.

I have spent much of my working life immersed in the pain of others, reporting wars in Baghdad,

Bosnia, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Congo and elsewhere.

For a long time I thought I could swan in and out of other people's wars and be untouched

by the passions that fuel the cycles of vengeance and counter-vengeance.

There were times when I escaped too narrowly with my life while others, some of them close to me,

died. I never thought it would happen to me.

I met Susan Sontag when I was covering the war in Bosnia for the BBC.

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