Journalists covering tragedies have little time to feel, react or grieve,
which can lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

By Courtney Lowery

Journalists are supposed to be observers, listeners, common storytellers. But sometimes, the stories they tell can take a silent toll on the reporter. Sometimes objective detachment from an emotional story isn’t humanly possible.

It wasn’t possible for Pete Chronis when he was covering the school shootings in Littleton, Colo., for the Denver Post.

When two students walked into Columbine High School on April 20, 1999 and murdered 16 people, including themselves, Chronis’ beat assignment changed. Chronis, who was then a general assignment reporter and is now an editorial writer, was sent to the homes of victims’ families like his other colleagues. These are interviews he will never forget.

“It really got to people,” he said. “It really kind of tore you up inside.”

Reporters are programmed to take in tragedy, collect the facts, pour them into black and white and give them to the public. They are trained to not get emotional, to not break down, to hold out and do their job. Oftentimes, they are unable to let themselves react to the stories they are covering.

“While you’re working on a story, you have to have a certain detachment to concentrate on your job,” Chronis said.

However, the age-old image of the tough reporter has recently been under scrutiny as more professionals working in the press put the spotlight on how the news affects the news gatherers themselves.

Sept. 11 was a catalyst for media analysts, psychologists and managers of the press to encourage journalists to be aware that the emotions they feel when on assignment are natural and real and need to be dealt with.

Journalists were behind rescue workers and public servants as the busiest people in the nation Sept. 11. They were called in on their days off and worked around the clock disseminating the news. When did they get a chance to react to the attacks as humans?

“News people try to pretend they’re hard-boiled,” Chronis said. “We’re not.”

Just imagine being one of the Reuters reporters who were on the phone with sources in the World Trade Center when the planes hit. Imagine what it felt like when the phones went dead.

Cratis Hippocrates, former head of journalism at Queenland University of Technology in Australia, studied journalists who covered a 1998 tsunami in Papua New Guinea, which killed about 3,000 people. Hippocrates said trauma is a real thing in a newsroom, but it is often ignored.

“Journalists have a history of denial. There is a perception that you are unprofessional if you can’t handle it,” Hippocrates said. “Journalists claim they are unaffected, but this false bravado takes its toll.”

That toll can sometimes lead to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Ikimulisa Sockwell-Mason, a 15-year veteran reporter for the New York Post, thought she was emotionally ready for everything. She’d seen it all, she told Editor and Publisher Magazine.

“I’ve always been able to detach myself from a story,” she said.

But when she started covering stories from Ground Zero, she knew she was wrong this time. She said the stress didn’t start showing up for four days, a common time for symptoms of PTSD to flare.

Other journalists reported similar symptoms after Sept. 11 — trouble sleeping, agitation and uncontrollable weeping.

Although Sept. 11 brought many of the emotional effects of covering tragedy to the forefront, a reporter doesn’t have to be covering the devastation of what is referred to as the “Big Three” (Columbine, Oklahoma City and New York City) to develop PTSD or other effects.

A study done at the University of Tulsa showed 78.7 percent of a sample of more than 3,700 journalists had covered at least one event involving death or injury on the scene, with 20 percent reporting they had watched someone being hurt or killed.

Of those surveyed, 70 percent said they experienced intense horror, disgust, fear or helplessness during their most stressful assignment.

The top three most stressful assignments were about a dead or injured child, murder and motor vehicle accident.

By covering these events, journalists, much like the rescue workers who respond, are vulnerable to going through severe emotional stress. A study of 130 journalists in Michigan and Washington announced that the rate of PTSD in journalists is only second to the rate in firefighters.

Researchers are now looking at advice traditionally given to rescue workers to set up support and tips for journalists.

Frank Ochberg, former associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health and current chair of the executive of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma at the University of Washington, describes PTSD as three reactions all at once.

These reactions come when a person experiences an event that terrifies, horrifies or renders him helpless. The reactions include recurring, intrusive recollections, emotional numbing and fear that affect sleep, security and concentration, Ochberg said.

By definition, PTSD is the reoccurrence of these symptoms for over a month.

And journalists do not have to bear witness to a tragedy to feel the effects of PTSD or other forms of emotional trauma. In fact, many journalists, like Chronis, can be disturbed through empathy.

Oklahoman managing editor Joe Hight describes this empathy as the “Wall Effect.”

“Like a tennis ball thrown against a wall, the victim’s emotion, all that grief, can bounce back and absorb the person facing the victims — the journalist,” Hight wrote in a Web article offering tips in covering disasters.

Hight was involved in the coverage of the Edmond Post Office massacre in 1986, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 and the outbreak of tornadoes in 1999.

He recommends offering individual counseling and even group debriefings in the newsrooms as well as encouraging journalists to get out of the newsroom, take breaks and try to return to normalcy through hobbies or get-togethers after a long stint of coverage.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, heightened attention has been given in newsrooms to helping journalists deal with the stresses that accompany covering tragedy. Editors have set up counseling sessions for newsroom employees, reporters have formed support groups and as time goes by, many journalists are realizing they cannot ignore the emotions running through them just because they are members of the press.

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma is one of the leading think tanks exploring the effects covering stressful assignments can have on journalists. The center is devoted to educating journalists on PTSD and how to deal with trauma in the newsroom. The center’s most recent project is setting up a facility in New York City to help journalists deal with the trauma of the Sept. 11 attacks. The temporary office is funded by the University of Washington’s School of Communications through a $250,000 grant.

“If you are an observer, it doesn’t matter how hard you try to be objective — you talk to survivors, police and rescuers, this begins to take toll on your own emotional well-being. You are sharing everybody else’s pain without a chance to address your own,” Simpson told the Seattle Times.

Like many journalists, after covering the Columbine beat day-in and day-out, the reality of the stories started to take its toll on Chronis and the rest of the newsroom. Management had set up counseling services for those working the beat, but Chronis felt the need to take it a step further. He organized a wake for all of the journalists working the shooting. For many of them, he said, it was the only way to express feelings of sadness after all the suffering they had witnessed.

The New York Times had a unique challenge after the terrorist attacks, considering some of the reporters working Sept. 11 had family or friends in the World Trade Center. Staff support took on a whole new meaning for management. The Times’ weekly newsletter swelled to 22 pages, complete with a list of missing family members of the Times’ staff.

“How easy it is for us to think of news as something that happens only to someone else. How easy to forget that we are human, and that this time, we are the victims as well as the storytellers,” the newsletter began.

Today, editors are faced with a new task. Their jobs no longer just entail assigning and overseeing news content. They are now forced to deal with the news in a different way — they must manage how their journalists are dealing with the news itself.

And the best way to do that is to allow journalists to feel and express emotions while covering tragedy. Journalists cannot slip into robot mode to achieve the highest level of objectivity, because they will either become numb from ignoring emotions or traumatized by bottling them up.

Journalists should remind themselves that they don’t have to be superhuman during tragedy. Researches say journalists should attempt to get their normal amount of sleep, cut down on caffeine intake and avoid alcohol use. They also encourage humor.

And possibly the most important thing journalists should remember is to allow themselves to embrace their sources as humans. Not only does the journalist benefit by de-numbing and dealing with those very real emotions, but society gets a more accurate picture of the news as well.

“You have to feel something for the people you are covering. That way, you don’t have an image of somebody that is not who they really are. You get the real picture, not just some cardboard cut-out of a person,” Chronis said.

Journalists are the chroniclers of history. What is history without pictures of struggle, emotion and snapshots of the human spirit? If journalists are conditioned to cover up emotion and hold back empathy, history will be cold and sterile.

As Ochberg wrote, the recognition of these emotions, including PTSD, “enhances not only a reporter’s professionalism but also the degree of humanitarianism brought to every victim interview.”

Today, Chronis continues to remember his days covering the Columbine shootings. It is not a matter of getting over it, he said, but a matter of remembering it. With every release of new information, he re-visits his days in the living rooms of families struck by tragedy.

He still watches for coverage on the kids injured in the shootings, and follows their progress. And those who died will always affect him, as a journalist and a human.

The pain a journalist feels after covering a tragedy like Columbine continues.

“I really still feel for those families,” Chronis said. “That will never go away.”