Dart Academic Fellows and Norwegian Photographer Revisit Utoya

During the 2012 Dart Academic Fellowship at Columbia Journalism School last June, the journalism scholars who comprised the Fellowship cohort had a fortuitous meeting that resulted, one year later, in a special section on the Utoya massacre in the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, for which one of the fellows, Ginny Whitehouse, serves as an editor.

The journal comes out at the same time that new work on surviving the massacre is getting international attention, including a feature in the New York Times Lens Blog. Norwegian photographer Andrea Gjestvang was working as a temporary photo editor at the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang on the day that Anders Behring Breivik bombed the government center in Oslo, rocking the paper's building. She covered the tragedy, which left 77 dead, many of them youth at an island summer camp where Breivik went after the bombing. Following the tragedy, Gjestvang began a photo project to tell the stories of survivors of the massacre. The book, "En Dag i Historien," ("A Day in History") was published in Norwegian this year.

The work by the Dart Academic Fellows analyzes international media coverage and imagery from the massacre in a special section of the Journal, "Exploring Questions of Media Morality." Whitehouse describes how the project came together:

“Over breakfast one day, we began comparing how media coverage of traumatic events varies across Europe. The Anders Behring Breivik trial in Norway was just concluding and the horror of the massacre at Utoya was still raw in everyone's mind. A group of us wanted to address the ethics of trauma internationally. As Cases and Commentaries editor for the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, I knew this was a rare opportunity to bring together the perspectives of a host of different scholars. Christian Moeller, a university lecturer from Germany, found Breivik's Nazi-style salute at the opening of the trial particularly disturbing and that seemed like the right place to begin the discussion. I wrote the case study and each Dart Fellow brought their perspectives to bear on their own countries' media coverage: Elsebeth Frey, a journalism professor in Norway, considered how the trial coverage directly impacted the victims; Moeller explored how journalists tried to avoid turning the trial into a Nazi PR opportunity. I asked two others to contribute: Monica Codina, a professor of media ethics in Spain, examined how Spanish media showed Breivik's salute in the context of fascism while Kirsten Mogenson, a journalism professor in Denmark, wrote about terrorism as a frightening form of communication and the salute as a representation of evil designed to further terrorize victims.”

The articles have been published in Volume 28, Issue 1, 2013 of the Journal of Mass Media Ethics: Exploring Questions of Media Morality (Taylor & Francis).