If, like me, you are one of the six million-plus people who wake up to Radio 4's Today programme, then you will know the routine. 0810: John Humphrys savages government minister. 0827: presenters mock reliability of the racing tipster. 0838: Sarah Montague is patronised by male colleagues. And so on.

The predictability is part of the appeal. At least it used to be until the editors developed a predilection for broadcasting detailed reports of brutal physical and sexual violence between 0715 and 0745, which, as it happens, is just when my Bagpuss radio alarm clock goes off. I've lost count of the number of times that I've woken in recent months, slowly facing up to the horror of another day drifting as a forgotten speck on this miserable earth, only to be pummelled by news of massacres, genocide and other outrages against humanity.

The single most traumatic example was aired at 0734 on Monday, December 8, in the form of a report on alleged war crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The six-minute item began with an interview with a woman who was gang-raped by six soldiers (while she lay on the corpse of her recently murdered husband), contracting HIV in the process, before moving on to an interview with a woman who had been gang-raped by five men, only to wake up in hospital after an emergency operation to be informed that her womb was so badly damaged that it had to be removed.

Frankly, it put me right off my Coco Pops. The average morning is hard enough without being regaled with tales of murder and torture before you've even separated yourself from your hot-water bottle. Not that I admitted it. Let's face it: you'd have to be a complete bastard to complain about the peace of your gilded life being shattered by news of the deprivation and suffering of others. At least, I thought that you'd have to be a complete bastard until last week, when Today broadcast an item on Liberia, which demonstrated that there is an alternative to such reports.

At first it seemed as though we were in for a Today wrist-slashing classic. Billed as an item on “the oldest republic in Africa”, “torn apart by two civil wars” that had left a “failed state” with a ruined economy, little running water and a system of government that barely functioned, it included visits to a co-operative where women were forced to harvest rice by hand because of a lack of tools and to a school for blind teenagers where pupils were left to fend for themselves upon graduation.

But unlike similar reports from abroad, this one didn't have me googling for the nearest branch of Dignitas. And this was because the reporter, the writer Zadie Smith, who was guest-editing the programme that day, didn't do the standard BBC foreign correspondent thing of neutrally and relentlessly detailing a series of awful events. Instead, her report was sprinkled with striking frankness (she admitted that she found elements of the visit “depressing and deplorable”), darkly humorous asides (she described her mortification at compulsively using figures of speech related to sight - “it would be great to look around and see how things work here” - at the blind school), clever metaphors and frank descriptions of what it felt like visiting Liberia as a privileged Westerner and to offer only a microphone in response. “A sense of disappointment falls over the visit like a shroud. Everyone is crestfallen... It's like rushing to a burning house with a glass of water.”

The whole bulletin , which even at 15 minutes didn't feel too long, was highly original and a reminder of why books such as The Diary of Anne Frank will always be a more effective evocation of the Holocaust than conventional history books: the most powerful stories are those told through the prism of personal experience.

I suspect that the programme-makers recognise this. After the item, the presenter, Evan Davis, interviewed Smith and admitted in admiring tones that the Liberia report had been “a different experience for the listener”. The problem for Today, of course, is that it may be difficult for the average reporter to replicate the style of someone who, after all, is the finest writer of her generation. Also, it could become grating if the Middle East correspondent, Tim Franks, were suddenly to start littering his reports with adjectives and details of his personal existential angst.

But there was one element of Smith's report that Today could easily replicate: the programme could hold back on the graphic description. When reporting on horrific events in scary parts of the world, listeners don't need to be told precisely how limbs were amputated, how intensely people screamed, exactly which blunt instruments were used. Euphemism and editing have a great deal to say for them.

Indeed, what is news if not editing? If media outlets simply told the most important stories of the day, the headlines would be the same all the time: the Aids crisis, climate change, the economic downturn and the Middle East. But editors routinely balance the requirement to tell the most important stories against what people can stomach. It's not that audiences don't care - they care too much. And there is only so much misery we can take.

Moreover, the amount of misery that we can take varies according to the medium through which news is conveyed - and when it is conveyed. Reading about a crime against humanity in a newspaper on a Wednesday afternoon is very different from listening to the same report in bed on Monday at 7:23am.

Morning radio is a specific thing. More intimate and invasive than any other media, its listeners are at their most vulnerable, often unable to turn the radio off because they are semi-comatose with sleepiness, in the shower or scoffing Weetabix. Regaling them with graphic tales of misery may win journalism awards, but serves little other purpose - except, perhaps, to increase the collective unhappiness of the world, and boost Heart FM's audience figures.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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