Covering conflict is a physical, psychological and ethical struggle. So is coming home. Both are at the heart of "Time Stands Still," a new play from Pulitzer Prize-winner Donald Margulies about a photojournalist played by Laura Linney and her reporter partner, confronting a conventional life after being injured in Iraq.
An important reminder for journalists: The deadline for entries to the 2010 Dart Awards for Excellence in Coverage of Trauma — open to all North American news media — is this Friday, January 29, 2010. That means there's limited time to submit your exemplary journalism on the impact of violence, crime, disaster and other traumatic events.
Conventional wisdom about the psychological impact of war on soldiers turns out to be not very wise at all. While public awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder has increased dramatically in recent years, in the minds of many it represents everything bad that combat can do to the mind and spirit. And the very term "disorder" implies a permanent condition from which there is little hope for recovery.
A soldier can leave the battlefield, but coming home doesn't mean the war is over. Men and women in the military are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan only to face a new set of struggles, as they carry physical and psychological wounds into a society that doesn't fully understand their experience or their sacrifice. To help them through the challenges of reintegration, the public needs to hear their stories, told with effective, ethical and sensitive reporting.
For the Dart Center staff, the murder of four Lakewood, Washington police officers last month, and the subsequent death of the suspected killer, brought back memories. One recalled her own experience covering an officer's death as a police reporter in Los Angeles and feeling unprepared to deal with the grief of the people she was working with in the police press room — not to mention her own reactions.
"We're all meaning-hungry creatures. We're permanent citizens of the republic of trauma." Those words were spoken by Pete Hamill, among 110 news professionals, artists, researchers and scholars who gathered in February 2009 at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University to explore how traumatic events challenge journalists' storytelling.
Dark, cold, grey, brooding Helsinki. This was the backdrop for Violence in the Networked Society, an international conference hosted by University of Helsinki’s Communication Research Center on Nov. 6 and 7, 2009. It was a particularly poignant setting, because in 2007 and again in 2008 Finland was the site of school shootings that together left 18 students murdered. In this highly literate and socially conscious society, the sense of communal grief was profound — a national trauma.
Mata’afa Kene Lesa woke up in heaven Sept. 19 and found himself in hell. When a tsunami struck Upolu, one of Western Samoa’s two main islands, Lesa – the editor of Samoa Observer – was one of the first local journalists to respond, racing to the affected area to be met by scenes of death and devastation.
What has become known as the "Black Saturday Bushfires" is Australia’s worse natural disaster to date. On Feb. 7, 2009, temperatures of 46 degrees Celsius and winds of 100 km per hour created explosive firestorms with 1500 times the energy of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
At first blush, the cultures of journalism and the military seem as opposite as transparency and secrecy. But in one respect, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation and the British Navy are identical: They each have a robust peer support program designed to deal with the emotional stress of working in a realm of violence and death.