TRAUMA TRAINING AND THE REPARATIVE WORK OF JOURNALISM

Abstract

This article examines discourses of trauma and affective labor in the emergence of trauma training in US journalism. In a body of training texts and films used in US journalism schools, crime and disaster journalism are being refigured as affective encounters between reporters and victims; in the process, training builds a language of trauma that describes and models the news making process as potentially reparative: as an epistemological meeting point between existing knowledge of social traumas and a training apparatus that enables constructs of trauma to do the cultural production of news differently. Rather than treat the emergence of trauma training initiatives as further evidence of the hegemony of therapeutic politics, I draw from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's calls for reparative critique, in which transformations in the process of news production may reveal the work of affective labor and its emotional intensities as key, but often unacknowledged, features of cultural production. Analysis of training films and manuals in these curricula, on the one hand, shows their attachments to a medical discourse of trauma that borrows language and constructs from the trauma science literature, replicating forms of referentiality between wounded bodies and traumatized psyches. However, their translation into representational practices and modes of conduct for reporters – as witnesses to others' testimonies – also pose ways of understanding the burdens and affective responsibilities professions like journalism increasingly bear for displaying and interpreting social change and political upheaval.

Keywords:

• trauma
• journalism
• affective labor
• reparative criticism
• training

Notes

1. Sunny von Bulow was the diabetic social heiress who was found comatose after her husband Claus von Bulow apparently gave her an overdoes of insulin; her children then later used their trust fund to open a national victim advocacy center whose mission was to offer assistance to victims whose high profile cases brought them unwanted media attention. For Sunny von Bulow's adult children, their mother's portrayal as a overbearing, pill popping socialite felt like an additional harm being committed against her, especially since her husband appeared in Vanity Fair magazine on his motorcycle with his mistress clad in black leather while Sunny lay in hospital (see Rose 1989, Weed 1995).

2. Trauma curricula are generally integrated into existing courses or are taught as stand-alone outreach seminars for working journalists. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington-Seattle School of Journalism offers four–six hour workshops where working journalists and journalism students learn how to sensitively conduct interviews with victims by learning the best ways to approach victims post-trauma, if at all (they are told to avoid interviewing child victims or those too traumatized to be able to knowingly consent to being interviewed). In the course ‘Advanced Reporting,’ journalism students at the University of Washington's Department of Communication receive training in a special three-part orientation session devoted to trauma science called ‘Covering Traumatic Incidents: A Curriculum for Training Student Reporters’ (Cane n.d.). Students are also required to enroll in an ethics course and can take an additional course on crisis communication. Dr Sherry Ricchiardi, a professor at Indiana University, Roger Simpson at University of Washington-Seattle and the news-editorial faculty at University of Colorado-Boulder have all incorporated trauma studies into media ethics and news-editorial courses. Indiana University also recently organized a statewide conference on the social and personal effects of crime coverage for journalists, journalism educators, deans of journalism schools, and journalism students. The University of Central Oklahoma's Center for People and the Media offers training to Oklahoma's newspaper industry to prepare journalists for how to deal with disasters and violence. Three of their faculty, Dr Terry Clark (head of the Journalism program), Dr William Hickman and Dr Kole Kleeman conduct statewide seminars to assist newspaper staff. Dr Kleeman also teaches an entire course, “Victims and the Media,” on the issue of trauma, news representation of violence, and journalistic practice (author communication with Kleeman, August 28, 2001).

3. One of these pieces is authored by Terry Clark, professor of journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma: ‘Victims’ Guide to the Media Helps Victims of Trauma Deal with Media Questions’, Traumatic StressPoints, vol.17, no. 3, 2003, [online] Available at http://www.istss.org/publications/TS/Summer03/index.htm (accessed March 8, 2009).

4. Shocked by its unexpected sonic assault within the opening seconds of the video, I inadvertently spilled scalding coffee down my body, physically burning myself in the process of watching a film on trauma.