Reporting Trauma: Conflict Journalists’ Exposure to Potentially Traumatizing Events, Short- and Long-Term Consequences, and Coping Behavior

ABSTRACT

Due to the nature of their jobs, journalists reporting from theaters of war, destruction, and violence are frequently exposed to potentially traumatizing experience. This study explores how journalists go about trauma exposure, how they deal with its emotional fallout, and what support they get in the process. In doing so, we use 35 qualitative interviews with conflict journalists working for news media in German-speaking countries, and draw on established theories of trauma exposure, its mental consequences, and ways to cope with them. Findings show that conflict journalists run a significant risk of experiencing trauma, either directly as targets of violence, or indirectly as eye-witnesses and as recipients of narrative accounts and vivid images of human suffering. Respondents noted a glaring lack of organizational support and prevention structure, which they connected to a problematic newsroom culture characterized by sexism, machoism, and a fierce competition.

KEYWORDS:

• Trauma
• mental health
• crisis reaction model
• coping
• conflict journalists
• violence

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://rsf.org/en/barometer

2 For information on the German media system, see, e.g., Brüggemann et al., 2014.