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I walked into it blind as a bat. My heart stretched, tears rolled
down my cheeks, and words would not come out of my mouth. I was
petrified. All of these feelings coursed throughout my body, leaving
me lost.
It was all hypothetical, a mere simulation put on by the Dart
Center for Journalism and Trauma and EffectiveArts, in which actors
portrayed victims of a traumatic situation, and I pretended to be
a reporter who needed their story.
A 100-unit apartment building is on fire and I’ve arrived
at the scene only a half hour after it started. There are four actors
in the corners of the room, and Communications Room 126 is buzzing.
It has transformed from a classroom to a fire scene and there are
reporters, notebooks in hand, crowded around each victim of the
fire.
I’m not going to lie. As I headed to my interview, a huge
knot of dread settled into my stomach. “I don’t want
to do this,” I thought. “What am I suppose to say?”
“She went up, I went down,” he said over and over.
Ben Stevens is a victim of the fire, and he is referring to his
wife. “She had bloody knuckles because she was knocking,”
he said with a distant yet painful look in his eyes.
I wanted to hide. I wanted to cry. I wanted to tell him his wife
was alive, and I failed to remember this wasn’t real. This
man who had just lost his wife engulfed me, and I felt like I should
be his friend, not the reporter. He told me her knuckles were bleeding
and she didn’t get out of the burning building. I didn’t
know how to respond. I could only picture a woman, desperately knocking
from door to door surrounded by flames and smoke.
It was in that second that I forgot all that entails being a reporter.
I forgot what questions to ask, and why I was there, but I felt
for him. I could see the guilt that weighed him down. Why is he
a survivor and not her? I questioned my next actions as a reporter.
Do I ask him about his wife and how they got separated in the
fire? Should I ask him for details on their life together? Do I
refer to her in present or past tense?
Stevens is a victim and his loss is irreplaceable. To know when
you’re being intrusive or when you’ve crossed the line
is so fine that you can’t really determine when you’ve
crossed it until you already have. Although I would like to be hopeful
and say it gets easier with every time I don’t know if it
will.
I was still at a loss in the middle of the interview and was thankful
when my time was up. Whether it was because I was relieved to be
done, or the abrupt end to the relationship I had created with Stevens,
I cried.
"I would never think it [interviewing someone] would be that
hard,” said Christine Benedetti, a junior journalism major
who also participated in the simulations.
According to Roger Simpson and William Cote in Covering Violence,
“They [some people in the news industry] do not believe that
journalists suffer more than momentary effects from doing stories
about violence, if they are affected at all.”
I could not disagree more. Although my interview lasted for five
minutes, I suffered with the victim, and even though I interviewed
an actor, the effects of trauma reporting are still with me.
As I walked out of the room I sliced through thick clouds of high
emotions and intensity. I didn’t stop to ask questions because
I thought I might cry again, and even though I knew Stevens was
an actor I could not look at him in any other light. He was a victim
and I was the nosy reporter.
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