I sometimes feel like a fraud as a former TV journalist: audiences in retreat; accusations of superficiality; and the sense of being somehow “special” disappearing from the genre.

It takes a biologist to remind me of the extraordinary power that still lurks within television journalism. That power is not rational and restrained but emotional and destabilizing. The biologist is Frans de Waal, and the quotes that follow are from Our Inner Ape: The Best and Worst of Human Nature. De Waal does not start from a promising position:

Our evolutionary design makes it hard to identify with outsiders. We’ve been designed to hate our enemies, to ignore the needs of people we barely know and to distrust anybody who doesn’t look like us.

But then he launches into a story that reminds me of why television – the “show me” medium – still has the power to break through the groups we construct to insulate ourselves from the world. And why television journalism has to understand people’s prejudices and potential, if it is to achieve anything.

Do I sound like I’m preaching? The goal of television journalism – is there such a thing? One word: empathy.

Here’s de Waal:

We are stuck with a human psychology shaped by millions of years of life in small communities so that we somehow need to structure the world around us in a way recognizable to this psychology. If we could manage to see people on other continents as part of us, drawing them into our circle of reciprocity and empathy, we would be building upon, rather than going against, our nature.

In 2004, the Israeli justice minister caused a political uproar by sympathizing with the enemy. Yosef Lapid questioned the plans of the Israeli army to demolish thousands of Palestinian homes in a zone along the Egyptian border.

He had been touched by images on the evening news.

“When I saw a picture on the TV of an old woman on all fours in the ruins of her home looking under some floor tiles for her medicines, I did think, ‘What would I say if it were my grandmother?’”

Lapid’s grandmother was a Holocaust victim. The nation’s hard-liners did not like to hear these sentiments, of course, and went out of their way to distance themselves from them.

The incident goes to show how a simple emotion can widen the definition of one’s group. Lapid had suddenly realized that Palestinians were part of his circle of concern, too.

Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire able to rid us of the curse of xenophobia.

It is the weapon of television journalism.