The Impact of Covering Traumatic Assignments

Abstract

An overwhelming majority of the literature discussed so far has painted a rather bleak picture of how the news media deal with death and dying. Some of these arguments include that journalists are ostensibly only interested in showing ever more graphic deaths in a pursuit of ratings. A tendency in such studies has been the portrayal of journalists as emotionless, almost robotic figures whose only purpose of existence is to select ever more graphic photos and videos to titillate audiences. Quite often such scholarship has allowed for only a very limited degree of agency on the part of journalists. Yet, the effect that the coverage of death has on news workers has often been neglected, despite the emergence of a very vibrant field of study into how doing their work may lead to serious post-traumatic stress disorder in journalists.