Trauma and Journalism
Director Europe, Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma
Journalists are in the firing line as never before. Dozens are killed every year and the emotional price that can be paid by journalists is also high. Last year there were 117 recorded casualties, most of them not in wars but working to uncover crime and corruption in their home countries.
It is only relatively recently that trauma among journalists has come to be recognised with compassion. Older journalists can remember times when after covering conflicts in places such as Southeast Asia, Africa , Northern Ireland, the Middle East and elsewhere it was considered wrong to admit to your editor that you were suffering, for fear of losing a promising assignment.
As in World War Two, the derogatory Allied term “lack of moral fibre” or “LMF” often showed a gross lack of understanding of a shell-shocked soldier suffering trauma.
“It is only recently that journalists have become aware that, like ambulance staff and police, they are emergency responders,” said Mark Brayne, Director Europe of the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma ().The Dart Centre, dedicated to lifting the trauma-journalism taboo, is a global network of journalists, journalism educators and health professionals dedicated to improving the media coverage of trauma, conflict and tragedy. It also addresses the consequences of such coverage for those in journalism.
Brayne quoted the celebrated British war photographer Don McCullin, who gave up journalism after too many distressing experiences. McCullin said: “When I went to war I came back with enormous guilt. I used to come back from place like Biafra and Somalia and see my children refusing food and I’d seen children dropping dead of starvation. I was a confused person. If I hadn’t kept this very fine balance in check I think I might have gone (mad).”
Brayne said: “Journalists are very resilient. But the walking wounded among journalists has been going on far too long. Journalists are neither invulnerable nor invincible. They have a responsibility to understand trauma, not just to use the distress of victims and survivors to boost ratings. If you have been on the receiving end of bad reporting, you will know how very personally traumatic that can be.
“Journalism can ruin lives and it has a major impact on how individuals, families, communities and societies, and even nations, deal with trauma.
“Trauma is something where a person’s sense of safety is taken from her or him, when somebody has their meaning taken away. That is when they get traumatised. We do not report trauma well but understanding trauma makes for healthier journalism and healthier journalists,” Brayne said.
BBC TV foreign correspondent Jonathan Charles told the conference that journalists “need suffering to convey some of our stories. We show the suffering of a community. This, inevitably, will bring us into contact with trauma. We are, after all, human beings. Trauma is our trade.”
“The most telling thing can be an eyewitness account rather than a pic of an image of limbless people. The most telling image of the (2004) Beslan siege was the sound of shooting starting and a father breaking down in tears,” said Charles, who covered the dramatic siege in which many children died in 2004.
From the audience, a Palestinian photographer working from Hebron said: “A person cannot do anything when a missile comes over my house or the house of my parents. So, at the beginning I tried to be balanced with my emotions. But it put me under pressure. I succeeded in balancing my feelings but at night I felt not human. I lost my feelings. Very bad.”
Brayne said it was important that such a person should not be left carrying those emotions on his or her own. “With support, it can be made less terrifying.”
He said there was no standard response to trauma. “It depends on your personal history. Journalism is a necessary business but it is a dangerous business.” The word “trauma” comes from the Greek – the piercing or wounding. Hence its use for physical as well as emotional conditions.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is characterised in several ways – they include fear, hopelessness and horror, unwanted intrusive images and memories, and numbing.
Kevin Carter of Newsweek died in 1994. “I can’t take this any more,” said the Pulitzer Prize winner. He gassed himself in a car in his garage.
Other words of traumatised journalists included “The torment engulfed my whole person”. “It catapulted me out of normality into another world”. “The impact increased as time moved on… the enormity is almost indescribable”.
The Dart Centre gives help and guidance on dealing with trauma among journalists.
“Listen to a colleague who needs to be listened to,” Brayne said.
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