New UW center helps journalists cope with stress
He’d arrived at the scene of many tragedies before, but nothing prepared George Kochaniec Jr. for what he saw after he raced to Columbine High School on April 20, 1999.
“I knew that there’d been a shooting at the school, but I had no idea of the extent of it,” Kochaniec says. “As I drove there and saw all the police cars, ambulances and helicopters converging on the scene, I knew something really dreadful must have happened.”
The veteran news photographer for the Denver Rocky Mountain News stationed himself in an area where wounded students were being triaged by emergency medical staff. Soon there were more than a dozen wounded students awaiting medical attention.
“I kept my distance from the injured kids by using a 500mm lens,” Kochaniec explains. “I’d never been in a situation like that, and I didn’t want to make it any worse for those kids.”
Kochaniec and his Denver Rocky Mountain News colleagues received the Pulitzer Prize in spot news photography last year for their photographs of Columbine. Yet more than a year after the tragedy, Kochaniec, the father of two high-school boys himself, is still sometimes bothered by what he experienced that day. “Little things trigger memories,” he says. “Sometimes I think I just can’t move on.”
Kochaniec is not unique in his reaction to the tragedy at Columbine. Reporters and photographers who have covered violent events say that afterward they feel sadness, exhaustion, guilt, apprehension and fear for family members and themselves, according to a recent study by UW Communications Professor Roger Simpson, a former reporter, and James C. Boggs, a UW doctoral student. Nearly three-quarters of all reporters surveyed acknowledge symptoms of stress after covering a traumatic event.
“Journalists carry around a lot of emotional baggage, some of it going back decades and decades.”
Roger Simpson, UW journalism professor
“The eye opener was in realizing how vulnerable reporters are,” Simpson explains. “Journalists carry around a lot of emotional baggage, some of it going back decades and decades after being out in the field covering car crashes, fires and suicides.”
Reporters’ symptoms of traumatic stress are remarkably similar to those of police officers and firefighters who work in the immediate aftermath of tragedy, yet reporters typically receive little support after they file their stories. While public-safety workers are offered debriefings and counseling after a trauma, reporters are simply assigned another story.
The intersection of journalism and emotional trauma—for both victims and the journalists who flock to a scene of violence for interviews, photos and video footage—is key to the mission of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a new research and teaching program at the UW School of Communications. The center began in 1999 under Simpson’s direction, with financial support from the Dart Foundation in Mason, Mich.
“There’s a cultural stereotype at work in a lot of newsrooms: the tough, macho reporter,” Simpson explains. “Very little of what goes on in the newsroom makes it any easier to bear up under stress. You’re not supposed to acknowledge anyone else’s discomfort, you’re not supposed to offer help. An admission about emotional trouble to management is perceived as a sign of weakness.”
The tendency of TV news, radio stations and newspapers to report on interpersonal violence, bombings, fires and disasters has generated controversy and inquiry. The Rocky Mountain Media Watch, in a 1995 survey of TV newscasts in 58 U.S. cities, found that crime stories dominate the content on local stations, with one in Louisville devoting nearly 85 percent of its news to crime stories.
The Columbine High School shooting was a stressful event for the journalists covering the story.
“Research has shown that beginning a newscast with a violent story engages the viewer,” Simpson says. “Violence is the currency of competition. The media are more likely than ever to cover violent events: human conflict, blood, injury and death. Who are the victims and how did they act?”
Given the media’s emphasis of covering violence, Simpson and fellow researchers have begun to look at what can be done to improve this coverage and the ways trauma affects the journalists who report it.
Simpson’s interest in journalism and trauma was triggered in the late 1980s when he invited a counselor from Seattle Rape Relief to talk with students in his ethics in journalism class. Until then, learning about emotional trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder—the disturbing physical and emotional re-experience of trauma after a tragic event—was not part of journalism training.
“We began to look at interviews as sequences of actions by reporters and responses of trauma victims that reporters need to understand,” Simpson says. “Most victims can talk and will talk, but reporters had never been alerted to the subtleties of victims’ responses.”
Frank Ochberg, a Michigan psychiatrist, has played a key role in developing the Dart Center. Ochberg was part of the team that first defined post-traumatic stress disorder after the Vietnam War, and he and Simpson began to discuss journalism and trauma in 1993 when Ochberg spoke at a conference in Seattle.
Simpson started working with students who would some day be sent to scenes of violence, often as soon as their first days as reporters.
“Going to the site of a car crash is a common assignment for the newest reporters,” Simpson explains. “We teach students to take their time and assess the physical and emotional status of the victims and family members. Allow them to feel comfortable, take them away from distractions, offer help, and ask if they want companions to be present during the interview.
“The hardest assignment for any photographer is to make an image of a grieving person.”
David Handschuh, journalist
“The biggest question, of course, is whether the interview should even be conducted.”
Sensitivity to trauma victims is an essential component to teaching at the Dart Center. Migael Scherer, a rape survivor, presented her perspective as a survivor of violent crime in her powerful memoir, Still Loved by the Sun. Scherer, who received her teaching certification from the UW, now directs the Dart Award, an annual competition encouraging sensitive newspaper coverage of violent events.
Scherer says that she expected to be devastated in the immediate aftermath of her assault during questioning by the police and emergency medical treatment, yet she was treated respectfully in both situations. Coverage by one Seattle newspaper, however, was a different story.
“Wrong Man Being Tried For Rape, Says Defense” was the headline she read while the trial was still in progress. To Scherer, it was as if the attacker, not his victim, had won the reporter’s respect and sympathy.
“I had to write the book—I almost didn’t have a choice,” she now says. “I was reading about myself in the newspaper and couldn’t understand where the reporter got her information. I was criticized for my performance as a witness, and I felt abused by the coverage.”
Scherer feared that the articles would make it less likely that other women would come forward to report sexual assaults, and she says that other women in her rape-support group told her as much when the articles were published. She wrote the book, in part, to counteract those articles and to report on the conviction of the man she testified against.
A scene from the Columbine High School shooting.
Scherer’s experience has been shared by many trauma victims and their families. The pain endured by family members of the murdered Columbine students is still powerful. Six families went to court last fall to prevent the Denver Post from gaining access to autopsy records of those who died at the high school. “The mass release of these autopsies would be pulling off the scabs of many children,” Dawn Anna, mother of one of the slain students, told the Denver Post.
Reporters are becoming more willing to talk about their discomfort in reporting this kind of story, Simpson says. More are going public about their experiences, including writing memoirs of their work as war correspondents. The Dart Center’s Web site includes personal accounts of the experiences by journalists like David Handschuh, who covered the Columbine shootings, and reporters who wrote about the Oklahoma City bombing.
Handschuh, a veteran news photographer for the New York Daily News, participated in a discussion on the Dart Center site about news photos he took in the aftermath of the Columbine shootings. His responses to the photos, which show students and parents mourning the dead teenagers, are contrasted with those of Jenny Wieland, co-founder of Mothers Against Violence in America.
“The hardest assignment for any photographer is to make an image of a grieving person, someone who has just been thrust into the media spotlight by sole virtue of experiencing a tragic loss,” Handschuh says. “Thoughtful photojournalists transport themselves into the subject’s shoes, wondering how we would react if put in the same position.”
Wieland acknowledges the value of some of Handschuh’s photos but feels that others are insensitive, especially those of children. She reacts strongly to one photo, taken with a telephoto lens of a child being hugged by an adult.
“We’ve got to remember the horrible effects violence has on children,” Wieland says. “She needed a hug and was getting one. It was not the moment the media should have intruded.”
Every UW journalism major now receives a trauma orientation, takes an ethics class and may take another in crisis communication.
Simpson is aware of the impact that intense media focus on traumatic events has on both survivors and journalists. He has invited reporters to participate in classes at the UW, and he recalls a fellow faculty member who was initially skeptical of the role-playing students took part in to practice their interviewing skills with trauma victims.
“Then the reporter talked about a police shooting of a drug suspect that he’d witnessed,” Simpson says. “He told about having emotional problems afterward. He’d get angry and have trouble sleeping. Eventually, police officers he knew noticed how irascible he was being and suggested he see the police psychologist. The reporter did so and realized how much seeing a death—being the man’s last civilian eyewitness—had affected him.”
Simpson, Scherer and their colleagues have conducted workshops, both in Seattle and around the country, in an effort to raise the standard of reporting on trauma and to help journalists understand the impact their jobs has on their own emotional well-being.
“We’re trying to encourage more humane practices,” Simpson explains. “If journalists are going to represent violence to us, shouldn’t they at least understand more about what they’re describing? Why should they be naïve or ignorant about the effects of violence?”
Simpson is also giving students training that was missing from his own undergraduate education as a journalism student at the UW in the 1950s.Every UW journalism major now receives a trauma orientation, takes an ethics class and may take another in crisis communication.
“The students have been comfortable and receptive to this part of their training,” Simpson says. “We have faith that when they get into the field they’ll be more knowledgeable about trauma and write more sensitive stories as a result.”
Though time pressure, competition from rival journalists, and a lack of preparation can mitigate against a reporter’s showing this sensitivity in the immediate aftermath of violence, Simpson feels that there are steps a reporter can take to do a better job under these circumstances.
“A good journalist takes some time to get a sense of how the interview subject is doing,” Simpson explains. “Give him or her a sense of control. Tell them who you are, and what you’re going to write. The sensitive reporter will talk to a person first, before walking into the home with a camera. Some reporters know this intuitively, and others can benefit from training.”
Scherer uses her experience as a trauma victim and her research to help journalists anticipate what they will encounter when they ask to interview survivors and their families.
“Emotional trauma is a physiological event,” she says. “Reporters need to understand the effects of emotional trauma and approach the victim with care, even when there’s no obvious sign of physical injury.”
While journalism programs at other universities include some elements of trauma training in their curricula, the UW’s Dart Center plays a unique role in combining teaching, research and outreach to news organizations. The Dart Center has helped begin similar programs at the University of Colorado, University of Central Oklahoma, Indiana University, and Queensland University of Technology in Australia.
The Dart Center also encourages a higher standard of journalism by granting annual fellowships to help reporters study emotional trauma, its effect on victims of disaster and violence, and the implications for news gatherers. The Dart Award for Excellence in Reporting on Victims of Violence is a national competition for a $10,000 prize to recognize a newspaper for its outstanding coverage of victims and their experiences.
The Roanoke Times won the Dart Award in 2000 for a series of articles on the suspicious death of an 18-year-old man arrested and placed in the care of a mental institution. The family’s grief and confusion after the death, and an official cover-up, make for compelling reading.
Ochberg, chairman of the Dart Center’s executive committee, is cautiously optimistic about the progress that’s been made in making journalists more aware of the impact of trauma on victims and themselves.
“The media have a role in the chain of violence,” he says. “Their reports sometimes focus on the most alluring elements of violation. We encourage them to search hard for the enlightenment that can come after a person’s experience of cruelty. These are the stories that should be told. Don’t hurt someone who’s already been hurt—there’s a way to give a voice to the survivor and tell a story that can help in the healing process.”
Simpson, who began his career as a reporter for the Wenatchee World and the Wall Street Journal, is also hopeful about raising the standard for media coverage of violence and its victims.
“We now know that many journalists have been affected by years of reporting on trauma,” he says. “They may avoid assignments or stop doing interviews with victims. This is bound to affect the ability to do their jobs.
“I’m optimistic that we can help newsrooms become more humane working environments and that reporters can be more creative in their approach to trauma.”
Living—and dying—with the media
A parachutist plummets to the base of the Space Needle after an ill-fated jump. Four men are injured, two of them fatally, when a gunman opens fire in the office of a Seattle shipyard. Two boys are rushed to the hospital with critical burns after a gas-pipeline fire in Bellingham.
When serious trauma occurs, all roads lead to Harborview Medical Center—both for the injured and the reporters who cover their stories. During my 10 years coordinating media relations at the state’s only top-level trauma center, I saw journalists at their best—and their worst—as they converged at the hospital to report on our patients.
The parachutist survived her fall with minor injuries and felt well enough to grant media interviews within hours of being hospitalized. Other victims of trauma, however, aren’t as fortunate, and then the relationship between the patients, their families and the media can become complex.
I can recall insensitive behavior by over-eager journalists. The memories usually begin with my getting a phone call from an angry nurse, as happened the time two newspaper reporters arrived unannounced at a teenager’s room. “Did I know these reporters were coming, and didn’t I realize the kid was still heavily medicated after just getting out of surgery?” she asked.
Of course, I didn’t know they were coming, and I sent the reporters on their way as soon as I could get up to the teenager’s room. They had wanted, it turned out, to ask about a drinking and driving fatality as a result of the car crash that injured our patient.
Another episode, however, stands out as a wonderful example of how a journalist (from the same newspaper) got his story and created a warm feeling for the people he interviewed.
Shootings at a Seattle high school left two students with minor injuries. One of them spent the night at Harborview, and she and her mother agreed to an interview with the reporter the next day.
The writer, a police-beat veteran, explained the questions he would ask and then allowed both women to tell their stories. The student took the opportunity to say she hoped to be a leader in promoting non-violence when she returned to school.
Then the interview ended, and the reporter did something I’d never seen before. He asked the girl and her mother if they wanted to read his article before he submitted it to the paper. He showed them his laptop computer and changed one detail at their request. (I won’t mention his name, lest his colleagues criticize him for breaking the journalistic protocol against showing a story to a source.)
By offering some control to the girl and her mother, this reporter made me realize how positive the interview experience can be when journalists treat their subjects with respect. He gave the girl an opportunity and helped her find her voice.