Trauma, Coverage of

Traumatic Events as News

Much news content involves topics or material that meet the lay definition of trauma as causing emotional upset. Conflict, consequence, and unusualness have been acknowledged as key news ingredients, and such events often involve content that has upset some people and whose content might evoke a strong emotional response in others. Within this broad category there is a considerable subset of news meeting the narrower medical definition of close exposure to (or threat of) death or the experience of serious physical or sexual harm or violence (DSM-5). At a global and national level, news of wars, terror attacks, mass shootings, natural disasters, air crashes, famines, and pandemics all involve death and serious injury which stand to traumatize the sources being interviewed, the audiences viewing them, and the journalists and photographers covering them. At a local level, the proximity of the event and the potential for audiences and journalists to know those affected can exacerbate trauma. Potentially traumatic local stories include serious car accidents, house fires, injuries to children, murders, criminal court reports, domestic violence, and sexual assaults. News not involving death or injury to humans might also trigger considerable shock and anxiety if not trauma, such as injuries to animals, environmental accidents such as oil spills, and financial and social crises such as stock market crashes and homelessness.

The modern history of the mass media has been punctuated by highly newsworthy events whose coverage has involved traumatized human subjects and sources, with the possibility to traumatize journalists and to enhance anxiety and emotional upset in audiences. Prominent examples from recent decades include the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, coverage of the Vietnam War (notably the images of the summary execution of a Vietcong fighter and the naked napalm-burned figure of the fleeing child Kim Phuc); the 9/11 terror attacks with the vision of the collapsing Twin Towers and victims in New York; the 2004 Asian tsunami; Hurricane Katrina in 2005; the 2020–2021 coronavirus pandemic; and public mass shootings such as those in Australia (1996), Norway (2011), New Zealand (2019), and the United States several times annually.

...