Journalism

Journalists, Photojournalists, and Newsroom Staff

In the past 10 years, anecdotal reports, memoirs, and empirical research have been slowly accumulating about the trauma effects on journalists and pho-tojournalists who work in trauma contexts. How journalists and photojournalists respond to, or cope with, traumatic events influences their reporting abilities and decision making around safety; in this regard, our understanding about the personal and occupational impacts of trauma reporting is essential in knowing how to support them in doing their work. The empirical reports show that journalists' experiences of trauma put them at risk for such difficulties as primary and secondary traumatic stress, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or more long-term difficulties such as depression, generalized anxiety, or struggles in relationships. Researchers such as Anthony Feinstein describe estimates of between 7% and 14% of people in the general population experiencing PTSD. He reports on other researchers who found that newspaper reporters with PTSD vary between 4.3% and 13%. From his own research, he found that about 28% of war correspondents and embedded journalists in Iraq suffer from PTSD. Photojournalists tended to have higher incidence of PTSD than do reporters because of the necessity of close proximity to traumatic events and the impacts of visual memory.

From an international perspective, the recent statistics for the harm or death of journalists is staggering. For example, the International News Safety Institute (INSI) reports that with an average of two a week in the last 10 years, more than a thousand journalists and support staff have died reporting news around the world. One in four of those individuals died from covering war and armed conflicts; the other three quarters died in their own countries during times of peace. INSI estimates that in two thirds of the cases of the hundreds of men and women who have been murdered, the killers were not even identified, and only in an eighth of the cases were the killers prosecuted. This evidence indicates that news reporting in trauma contexts has its costs to those who gather and report it worldwide.

Despite these struggles, journalists and photo-journalists have also reported unique forms of coping and resilience in dealing with the difficulties that come with witnessing trauma and conflict that are specific to their profession. For example, researchers Patrice Keats and Marla Buchanan reported that journalists in their studies described resiliency and coping in four ways: through (1) hardiness (finding meaning, influencing surroundings, learning, and growth), (2) avoidant coping (consciously or unconsciously avoiding unpleasant thoughts, emotions, and memories), (3) positive emotion, laughter, and optimism (consciously pursuing positivity), and (4) a sense of altruism and intense meaningfulness (news-gathering as being for the greater good of society). These findings show that journalists are also resilient and have specific characteristics that assist them in coping with adversity in their work.

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