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A Nov. 17, 2005, discussion, in conjunction with the Bournemouth University Media School and the Tavistock Institute, about the role of journalism in the emotional framing of news content and the lessons journalism might learn from the world of trauma therapy and research. The presenters were Barry Richards of Bournemouth, leading researcher in media and terrorism, and the Dart Centre's European Director, Mark Brayne, a former BBC correspondent and now psychotherapist. Becky Saunders provides this report ...
Mark Brayne began his presentation talking about the editorial impact of trauma, describing a recent article in the Guardian where a traumatised foreign correspondent had filed a report, about someone being held captive, tortured and beaten to death, in graphic detail which made the front pages but was later retracted when it turned out that although the individual had been badly beaten he was indeed alive. The correspondent had evidently been so traumatised by what he had witnessed that what he reported be believed to be true.
The way that Bird Flu was being reported in Kosovo is another example, Brayne said. In his view, the coverage was creating panic amongst the people. He suggested that a population already traumatised needed little prompting to once again fear intrusion from without. He used these as examples to illustrate that whilst journalism aims to ‘tell it like it is’ there is both an internal representation of ‘how it is’ and an external one that may both become distorted.
Emotion can be of great value to journalists, Brayne said, in that it enables them to connect with the human aspects of what they are reporting on. He described the use of emotion in this way as being part of the toolkit of journalists, but said also that it was important to understand the role of emotion in reporting, particularly in relation to trauma.
Next, Brayne talked about what he described as ‘Mc News’ referring to Daniel Goleman’s ideas about ‘emotional intelligence’. He talked about ‘limbic reporting’, and that (limbic) part of the brain that is to do with survival, fight or flight. Brayne suggested that the evolutionary advantage in checking out external events to evaluate their impact on ourselves, draws us to ‘rubberneck’ traumatic, violent or disturbing events. He likened this to the fatty, carbohydrate laden rush from fast food as a response to scarcity. He went on to say that the media play into this, with an assumption about what people are interested in, but at the expense of a balance with the more reparative, constructive and creative reporting that might follow such events, or on the more everyday things that go on in the world, what he called ‘Act 2 reporting’: what happens next, resilience, recovery, and the long term impact of events.
The second presenter, Barry Richards, talked about journalism and the emotional public sphere. He said that journalism has a crucial role to play in the 'standing fund' of anxiety within people, that can spill out into panic, disorder and dysfunction. He used a description of the kind of emotional labour undertaken by different professions in their work, and the importance of this in mediating the response from the public. Managing their emotional presence, was he thought, an important aspect of the work undertaken by journalists.
He drew our attention to two different aspects of journalism and the emotional public sphere, the first the role of reporting in politics and the second the role of journalists in reporting terror. Richards said that the adversariality and cynicism amongst the media, about politics, was contributing to a disengagement of the public. He described a bias against hope that was endemic in the reporting. He suggested that this represents a defence against the anxieties of hope, that was not only confined to the media, but that there was a particular political importance in how emotions are managed in the news.
Richards went on to look at the way events after September 11th were reported, giving some analysis of the shifts in tenor of the reporting in the days following. He suggested that the containing function of the media has been weakened, and that the kinds of images used in the media contributed towards an increasing incomprehensibility of events.
Richards also talked about the rise in the use of ‘citizen journalism’—of the use of mobile text messaging, blogging, and digital camera’s used by members of the public to capture events in the raw. He questioned the role of this kind of reporting in contributing to public understanding.
Richards said that some emotional processing of events, by journalists, allows the public to be secondary rather than primary witnesses, reducing the level of immersion in the horror of what is taking place. he argued that we need journalists to have this kind of emotional literacy to separate the emotional responses to what was witnessed from the 'truth' of the subject.
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