User-generated content can traumatize journalists who work with it — a new project aims to help by Laura Hazard Owen.
From the post:
Journalists and human rights workers who work with troubling user-generated content as part of their jobs may experience vicarious trauma as a result of handling distressing content. A new research project aims to help by surveying and interviewing such workers and developing a set of best practices for news and humanitarian organizations.
Nonprofit think-tank Eyewitness Media Hub is running the project with backing from the Open Society Foundation. EMH was founded in 2014 by former Tow fellows Sam Dubberley, Pete Brown, and Claire Wardle, who had previously researched how broadcasters use user-generated content (UGC) in their news output, along with Jenni Sargent.
“A lot of research so far has [questioned whether] vicarious trauma is something that exists,” said Dubberley. “We’re starting from the premise that it does exist, and would like to understand what organizations are doing about it, and how people who are using it on a day-to-day basis feel about it.” As head of the Eurovision News Exchange, he said, “I had a team of 20 journalists sourcing content from Syria and the Arab Spring through YouTube and saw them being impacted by it, quite seriously.”
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I am quite mystified as to why news content traumatizing journalist or members of the general pubic is a problem?
If we could vicariously experience the horrors that are financed by the United States government and others, literally be retching from fear of the next newspaper, radio broadcast or cable news broadcast, wouldn’t that be a good thing?
If anything, reporters need to take the gloves off and record death rattles, people screaming in agony, calling for death, while identifying the forces that were responsible.
One wonders how may heroes parades would happen if the streets were lined the photos of their victims, pulsing with audio of the last moments of their lives.
How proud would you feel to have butchered innocent women and children in service of your country?
Let’s bring the reality of war back to the evening dinner table. It helped end Viet-Nam. Perhaps it could help end some of the current cycle of madness.