Weathering the trauma storms

Abstract

Academic Rees writes: “Accounts of distress, loss and suffering are the daily meat of the news industry. Indeed, from nursery tales to Shakespeare, our cultural life has always been founded, in significant part, on the need to understand and face down the various horrors that can destroy life or limit its enjoyment afterwards. In one survey of 906 American print journalists, 96 per cent said that they had been exposed to work-related trauma. In a similar sounding of press photographers, the figure rose to 98 per cent. And yet, despite the fact that so many journalists are directly in the trauma business, there is very little formal instruction in the mechanics of traumatic experience or in how best to work with those who have been affected.” And in advocating trauma awareness training he concludes: “[It] may be the journalistic equivalent of what the military call a live-firing exercise, a situation that forces the development of professional skills – in the journalists’ case, those of empathic listening and dispassionate reporting. [But] It may even encourage better journalism right the way across the range.”