From the professionals

Newspaper Research Journal, Winter 2003 by Casey, Ginger

I was no different than most Americans, glued to my set as the carnage of Sept. 11 and its ensuing developments unfolded before my eyes. Watching reporters as they tried valiantly to provide sane and reasoned coverage even though they looked as if they were standing at the gateway to hell itself. Although the initial horror has passed, the news cycle-with its insatiable appetite, continues to demand to be fed with more stories, more coverage, more answers to unanswerable questions.

This will be a difficult time for news people. The initial surge of adrenaline that resonates like a siren's call in our consciousness will start to pass. The body can engage in a flight response for only so long. We will begin to see the cracks emerging in the armor we think we have. These can be crankiness, sleeplessness, bad dreams, foggy thinking, depression, impotence, unfocused anger, sadness that wrap themselves around us like a shroud.

I hope that the managers who run the newsrooms of this country are sensitive that journalists can run on 'fumes' for only so long; adrenaline can carry us far, but only for a short time. Eventually, we, too, will tire. Eventually, we, too, can go under. We use little ploys in the field to protect us, illusions really, that help us pretend we are okay. We find safety in our technology, even though these shields are cheap tricks, designed to fool us into thinking we are emotionally armored. We cloak ourselves in notepads and microphones when we march off like good soldiers to the scene of disaster and devastation. We line up like bowling pins for our live shots, boxing in the surrounding madness in minute-and-a half stories on the nightly news, working three phones at once to get a story filed. Photogs used the old trick of keeping the viewfinder firmly against their eye, giving them a false sense of security that they are somehow controlling the images in front of them.

While we may fool the public, it is harder to fool ourselves. When on the scene, experiencing the full 360 degrees of an event, it is emotionally and physically assaulting. The longer we linger, the more the unboxed context begins to worm its way inside us. The screen falls away, the smells, tastes, the fear and grief that roll off people like an acrid electrical charge begins to erode our professional defenses. Managers can sit behind their desks in a newsroom, and channel surf the competition, but they are much, much farther removed than they think. They can look on in horror at moving electronic pixels, but they simply are not there experiencing the emotional consequences of the world we cover.

Journalists may not be pulling people from the rubble (a guilt that we all carry home deep in our hearts), but they are there nonetheless, providing eyes on the world for the rest of us, trying to witness for us, to provide context and meaning to madness. How can we expect their professional training to cut their hearts out of the process? It is our industry's Catch-22. We are supposed to move others with our work, but we are not supposed to be moved by it ourselves.

Those at home can turn the pages of our newspapers and magazines or watch the nightly news, but they always have the option of turning the TV off or closing the paper. We don't think about the photographers who captured those pictures and what it was like for him or her to go home that night, haunted by their own images, what it was like to sit in an edit room to piece their stories together, seeing fear and terror in slow motion or watching heartbreaking pictures emerge from a chemical bath. Those journalists in New York will suffer the same fatigue, respiratory problems, the same debris-scratched corneas, diarrhea and post-traumatic stress and grief as the rescue workers. But they will not be fortunate enough to console themselves with the thought that they tried to save a life. In fact, journalists are often looked upon as electronic rubber-neckers, sharks in a feeding frenzy, intrusive, insensitive beasts. So not only are they in the middle of horror, they are often despised and criticized for it as well.

There's no question there are some among us who could do much, much better. There are those who see crisis as a fast track to a better job-those whose ambition overrides their sensitivity at the worst possible time. But we have also seen moments of true grace. Watching Dan Rather break down on the David Letterman show after coming off his marathon anchor duties made some people laugh, but it made me respect him as a journalist even more to know he was so moved; watching Peter Jenning's deft and gentle touch with children in a special he did, made me love him for his heart. The field reporters and photographers who risked their own safety to bring home the stories we sat on the edge of our seats for, pushing themselves to do it right despite what it may have cost them has made me proud to have been one of them. They renewed my hope that our profession has not sunk completely into a morass of infotainment journalism that serves to prop up corporate ownership and pop culture.