The Utoya Effect: A New Study Finds Surprising Results
In the aftermath of Norway’s Utoya massacre in 2011, Trond Idås, a Dart Center fellow and former journalist who advises the Norwegian Journalists Union, embarked on a study of journalists who covered the terrible event, which left 69 dead (as well as eight others from a car bomb he’d set off in Oslo.) Idås’s findings, recently featured in the Columbia Journalism Review, were revelatory, shedding new light on the psychological effects of covering trauma. He found that the stress and hardship journalists suffered after the tragedy increased if they thought their reporting had caused harm.
It was a unique situation, though not unthinkable in today’s ultra-connected techno media world. During the shooting, some journalists had called the cellphone numbers of some of the students trapped inside the Norwegian political camp that the gunman, Anders Behring Breivik had targeted, in order to find out what was happening inside. It was later determined that Breivik had used the call sounds to track victims who were hiding. Journalists who had made the phone calls found themselves reading the list of the dead, wondering if their phone calls had contributed to the killing.
Journalists, Idås says, “are not there to help anyone,” which “runs against the ethical and moral dilemmas as a human being,” especially when others on the scene are likely first responders or police who are there to help.
Idås compared the number of journalists at significant risk for PTSD nine months after covering the Utoya shooting with journalists nine months after their return from reporting on the 2004 tsunami that killed 280,000 people in Southeast Asia. About 10 percent of journalists covering the tsunami were considered at risk nine months later; about three times that many were still at risk after covering Utoya.
Reasons for this discrepancy are speculation, but include a few notable possibilities. One is that human evil is more difficult to deal with than natural disaster. Another is that in the Utoya massacre, the relative age of the victims and journalists was proximate—which also meant that the average age of the journalists covering such a trying event was extremely young. Due partly to the tragedy taking place during the summer, July 22, a staggering 23 percent of the journalists on the scene were summer interns; 40 percent had less than five years experience.
Finnish researcher Klas Backholm, who also collaborates with Idås, says having organizations set standards for emergency reporting ahead of a catastrophe can help reduce the intensity of stress responses. “If an organization and employee have a clear viewpoint—together, we want to say this is our ethical threshold—then everyone is on the same page when something happens,” he says.
Read more about the Dart Center Fellows discussing the media coverage of the Utoya shootings here and a report from the Finnish-Swedish publisher's association seminar on covering tragedy in light of Utoya here.