By Gayatri Sabharwal

In 2012, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about the horrors of his experience reporting in Hama, Syria, thirty years earlier.[1] Friedman was a correspondent working in Beirut in 1982 and had visited Hama to report on the aftermath of an uprising. Then-President of Syria Hafez-al-Assad had crushed the Muslim Brotherhood’s rebellion against his Ba’ath party government and besieged Hama for twenty-seven days. When Hama reopened to the public, the ruin was evident. Friedman claimed that he had never before witnessed brutality at that scale, recalling that entire Hama neighborhoods had been professionally steamrolled into parking lots the size of football fields.

Such traumatic reporting experiences were perhaps less common in 1982 than they are today. In the three decades between the Hama uprising and the publishing of Friedman’s article, accessibility to especially dangerous war-torn areas has increased, and consequently, threats presented by war journalism have only heightened. According to a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists, 2012 was one of the worst years on record for the number of journalists killed on duty.[2] Although war journalism has always posed threats to the physical and mental health of journalists, many reporters agree that it has evolved into an “especially dangerous profession” in recent years.[3] Further, advancements in new technologies, such as digital media, have enabled ordinary citizens to generate and distribute content online. Therefore, veteran journalists are no longer the only ones engaging in war journalism; rather, freelance citizen journalists with little wartime experience are braving the frontlines to report on war stories.[4]

Despite these developments, it is unclear if media organizations have assumed responsibility for the emotional well-being of contemporary wartime reporters. What do media organizations owe war reporters, given the psychiatric risks they take?

The Importance of Emotion in Contemporary Wartime Journalism

Researchers have investigated the physical threats of war journalism, the psychopathology of war journalists, and the psychic costs of war reporting. For instance, academics in the field of psychiatry, Feinstein, Owen and Blair, explored the prevalence of mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among journalists who cover war zones, finding that “war journalists have significantly more psychiatric difficulties than journalists who do not report on war.”[5] However, there is a lack of research on what the depth and complexity of the subjective emotional experiences of different war journalists can reveal about media organizations and their responsibilities toward journalists.

This article asks the question: how do media organizations view the role of journalists’ emotions in reporting? By examining wartime journalists’ wartime coping mechanisms, we can infer the resources and support given to them by the media organizations for which they work. I use this data to better understand how media organizations view the role of emotion in reporting and the responsibilities they have towards their employees.

This article thus attempts to fill gaps in the literature on contemporary wartime journalism by analyzing the subjective emotional experiences of wartime journalists. It investigates what such experiences might reveal about media organizations’ roles in the well-being of their reporters. It argues that unspoken institutional rules about feelings can constrain the experience and expression of emotion among war and conflict journalists. As the difficult experiences the contemporary wartime journalists in this study reveal, media organizations must assume greater responsibility for the emotional well-being of their journalists. Specifically, they must treat emotion as a collective problem — rather than an individual one — among journalists and increase institutional support for wartime reporters.

Finally, given the small sample in this study, I make my analysis with the caveat that the data collected indicates the need for future research on this topic. I suggest two specific avenues for further research before concluding.

Methodology

For this article, I recruited eight war and conflict journalists — four male and four female — from media outlets such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, and VICE News. At the time of writing, two were based in the United States, five were based in India, and one lived in the Middle East. The journalists were recruited non-randomly through purposive sampling or criterion-based sampling. An important feature of purposive sampling is that the sample units are chosen because they have characteristics that allow for the investigation of specific themes and research questions.[6] Due to the sensitive nature of the interviews and the information presented about their news agencies, interviewees will remain anonymous in this article.

I laid out four primary sampling criteria for my research study. First, I wanted to interview journalists who had reported on war and conflict within the past two years. Second, I was interested in recruiting journalists who were willing to speak candidly and share their personal stories of war and conflict journalism. Third, I wished to conduct all my interviews in English and thus only selected journalists sufficiently fluent in the language. Finally, I planned to conduct my interviews remotely. To save time and resources, I could only interview journalists who had access to internet connection or mobile phones and were able to speak with me via Skype or by phone. I used in-depth, semi-structured interviews with open-ended questions to explore the subjective emotional experiences of the war and conflict journalists.

I analyzed the interview data using thematic analysis, an inductive qualitative method with an exploratory, descriptive, and content-driven orientation. This method was used to elicit patterns from the interview data and connect these patterns to concepts and categories in literature. Thematic analysis is also useful to compare codes and thematic data across different interviews.

I used Dedoose, a cross-platform application for analyzing qualitative research, to conduct thematic analysis on the interview data. I used two code cycles. The first code-cycle mapped words or “parent themes” in interviews to broad categories, including “coping mechanisms,” “emotional state during event,” and “human elements of reporting.”[7]The second cycle code created in-vivo codes or sub-codes corresponding to the first-cycle analytical codes. These codes were extracted from phrases in each interview for each parent theme. I thus compared how the parent theme was expressed differently across interviews and then mapped the journalist’s experience back to this theme.

Results and Interview Themes

1. Individual Coping Mechanisms:

Broadly, the interviewed journalists adopted hedonistic and activity-oriented coping mechanisms, internal coping mechanisms, or a combination of the two.

Three journalists seemed to adopt hedonistic and activity-oriented coping mechanisms. One journalist claimed that he resorted to drinking, drugs, and food as a means to treat himself.[8] He would also buy nice things and clothes as a way of dealing with the emotional aftermath of wartime reporting comfortable. He used exercise and spending time in nature as other strategies to cope with work. Importantly, he seemed cognizant of both the “positive” and ‘negative’ coping mechanisms that he was using, commenting on the inherent value of these strategies. For instance, he specified that he made some “questionable decisions” and “let some friendships fall to the wayside.” Another journalist said she would paint, bake, do gardening and write poetry to get her mind off work.[9] One journalist said that he would read to relax.[10]

Other journalists seemed to employ internal coping mechanisms, which involved changing their approach to the situation on a personal level. For example, one journalist said that he maintained emotional discipline to not allow his reporting to take over his entire life.[11] Another journalist mentioned that meditation and yoga helped him to cope with the stresses of work and helped him be calmer during challenging reporting situations.[12]

2. Institutional Support for War and Conflict Journalists

Despite these individual coping strategies, some journalists expressed a need for greater institutional support from media organizations to ensure their safety and overall wellbeing. One such journalist felt that media outlets should better prepare their journalists before they go into the field to report. She explained that while journalists typically receive skills training in writing, recording or (camera) shooting, they are “never trained about what to do when things go wrong.”[13]

In addition to preparing journalists with coping strategies, she proposed that media organizations ensure that journalists took the necessary safety precautions before going into the field. She explained that journalists she knows have died from dehydration and malaria while reporting. She suggested that these fatalities could have been averted if the media organizations had taken necessary precautions to care for the journalists.

At the same time, however, this journalist admitted that the media organization that she worked for took care of both preparation for and recovery from war reporting. For example, her media organization enrolled her in two courses on first aid and mental preparation for conflict reporting. This organization also paid for her surgeries, treatment, and therapy after she was physically injured because of a bomb blast in the field.

The other journalists, however, did not share her experience. These journalists either reported to not have received adequate institutional support or claimed to learn simply from their own reporting experiences. For example, one journalist suggested that she would often lose out on sleep and vacations because her media organization would call her at 3:00  or 4:00 a.m. [14] She said that working constantly eventually took a toll on her health.

Another journalist explained that he learned techniques to protect himself along the way. For instance, he realized that he should always be in touch with someone while he was reporting and only have possessions on himself that he could explain, in case he were to be interrogated. He suggested, though, that there might be no foolproof plan to circumvent challenges while reporting. “…Given the idiosyncratic nature of going to a specific place at a specific time in a specific warzone, you at least are aware that when you go back out, the dangers are going to be different ones,” he explained.[15]

3. Emotional Isolation

Finally, given the sensitive nature of the profession, some journalists suggested that they felt isolated from family or non-journalist friends in their emotional experiences. They therefore were private about their reporting and did not share many details with their family or non-journalist friends. This was also important to ensure that others would not worry about them while they were away reporting.

In light of this, some journalists suggested that journalists talk to each other in order to decompress after a stressful war or conflict reporting experience. One journalist gave the example of media organizations that fly their reporters out to a major city — say, Dubai — after they cover an event in a warzone in the Middle East. This experience is an important part of the rest and recuperation process for the reporters. She admitted that it was important to acknowledge emotion rather than to “[bury] it somewhere deep.”[16]

Commentary and Suggestions for Reforms

Juxtaposing the journalists’ narratives provides insights into the power dynamics in the profession. The media organization that provided the journalist with preparation courses, treatment, and therapy perhaps had more resources than the media organizations that did not. In this case, caring for the emotional wellbeing of journalists becomes a function of a media organization’s finances. It could also be that this media organization prioritized the safety and emotional wellbeing of its reporters more than the other media organizations did, and specifically allocated more resources for precaution, preparation, and recovery programs. In this case, the emotional wellbeing of journalists depends on the priorities within the management and the policy decisions that it makes.

There are a number of practical implications of these findings. First, journalists could, formally or informally, share their emotional experiences of reporting, as this research suggests that people use the experiences of others as reference points to understand their own. For example, multiple journalists discussed their sleep problems in the interviews. These journalists could come together to tackle such problems and cope with related stresses of the profession. Merely speaking about an event, too, might prove to be the first step to make positive changes in favor of overall wellbeing.

Second, larger media organizations could pay more attention to the emotional wellbeing of their journalists. For example, they could offer programs that prepare their frontline reporters to provide both physical and emotional first aid. They could also develop precautionary measures—such as a code of conduct for journalists who report on war and conflict—that would require the reporters to always be in touch with someone from the company during reporting trips. Media organizations could also ensure that their conflict journalists have met a basic standard of preparation, such as a mandatory examination for journalists before they go out into the field.

Third, media organizations could allocate time for emotional processing to give journalists the space to deal with traumatic feelings post-conflict, rather than expect them to carry on with work as usual. In addition, these organizations could actively promote the expression and labelling of emotions among warzone journalists. The interviews suggest that the media environment implicitly restrains the expression of emotion among journalists. To help journalists better cope with heightened emotion, media organizations should broaden the types of emotions that are acceptable for journalists to feel in their profession. This could include offering journalists pre-reporting emotional intelligence programs and post-reporting counseling.

Finally, media organizations need to view journalists’ emotional challenges as a broader—rather than an individual—matter and provide more institutional support to journalists. The emotional challenges are typically due to the nature of the stories that they report on. Therefore, addressing challenges should also be within the institutional framework of the profession. Specifically, since media organizations profit from journalists covering stories in war zones, these institutions should also take responsibility for supporting their employees’ longer-term wellbeing after having worked in a conflict area. Journalists often come up against rules and cultural structures that might constrain their ability to cope with emotion. A collective processing of emotion within the profession could thus help them circumvent some of these restrictions. Moreover, the journalists themselves expressed a desire for media organizations to provide more support through training programs, precautionary measures, and recovery schemes.

Avenues for Future Research

There is a need for larger data sets to conclusively make claims about war journalists’ emotional experiences. While anecdotes can be insightful areas of research, they may not be sufficient to create a general theory.

1. Gender Socialization and Wartime Reporting

One possible area of future research could be to investigate if gender socialization and emotional vocabularies could play a role to assist or inhibit men and women journalists to cope with heightened emotion during war and conflict reporting. A further study could investigate if contemporary female wartime reporters better positioned to cope with emotional challenges in wartime reporting than their male colleagues.

The literature suggests that gender socialization affects behavioral calculations, creating differences in the ways in which men and women manage emotion. For example, Bugental et al. noted that women are more likely to smile even while angered or frustrated than are men.[17] Similarly, in his study of facial expressions, Ekman found that women are more likely to mask anger and men are more likely to mask fear.[18] Applied to the case of contemporary wartime journalists, this research could mean that women have access to a richer cultural vocabulary of ‘nurturing’ emotions than men.  The concept of gender differences might help corroborate this claim. A paper by linguists Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko discusses gender differences, a paradigm by which “women are seen as more emotional than men, and therefore more likely to be emotionally expressive and to discuss more intimate and emotional subjects.”[19] This might allow women to express and cope with those emotions in a more empowered and authentic way than men.

Some of the data points in my study corroborate this research. For example, some men and women conflict journalists made references to specific gender-based qualities while narrating their subjective experiences of reporting. Three out of the four women journalists made references to family, maternal instincts or to feelings of familial bonds. One female journalist spoke of experiencing what she called a “maternal instinct,” after reporting on an infant’s death as a result of an accident in the delivery room of a conflict zone.

Women journalists thus might be able to feel and express certain nurturing qualities that allow them to experience connection to innocent civilian children in a warzone. This might, in turn, assist them with the emotional burden of the experience. The concept of emotional granulation, or the “skill to construct emotions in a more precise and functional way,” supports this idea.[20] Psychologists Lisa Feldman Barrett and Maria Gendron have discussed research that shows that individuals who are more emotionally granular are better at self-regulation.[21] For example, if women feel connected to innocent civilian children in a warzone and identify certain nurturing qualities in response to this connection, they might be better able engage in emotional granularity, and make sense of their emotional experiences during wartime reporting. Male journalists, on the other hand, might be less likely to exhibit such emotional granularity, if they are less likely to experience, or label, “paternal instincts” toward civilian children in a warzone. In such reporting situations, women and men journalists might experience and cope with emotion in markedly different ways.

Research into gender differences in processing emotions could greatly help discover the limitations of the current available repertoires of emotion that journalists have access to. Expanding this repertoire of emotion and allowing and assisting contemporary journalists to better process their emotional experiences during reporting could prevent burnout, increase well-being and efficiency, and boost the productivity and output of media organizations worldwide, at an especially stressful time in history. A longitudinal study might be useful to investigate the impact of sharing this research on the lives of war and conflict journalists. If significant, these changes could be incorporated at the institution-wide level to reform the policies of media outlets and improve the lives of contemporary war and conflict reporters.

2. Secondary Trauma and Wartime Reporting

Another possible area of future research could be what wartime journalism can tell us about secondary trauma. Researchers Dubberley, Grifffin, and Bal conducted an in-depth study on the impact that viewing traumatic eyewitness media has upon the mental health of staff working for news, human rights, and humanitarian organizations. The ostensible pervasiveness of secondary trauma among these journalists notwithstanding, the researchers found a lack of organizational support for dealing with secondary trauma. Many interview respondents — including those who were diagnosed with PTSD — self-referred to professional counseling and some “even resigned where they had no organizational support.”[22] This finding, if corroborated by research on subjective emotional experiences, could especially help strengthen the case of support from media organizations, and advocate for greater tools within the profession for journalists to cope with emotion during wartime reporting.

Conclusion

This research contributes towards filling the gap in literature about journalists’ subjective emotional experiences during wartime reporting. The in-depth semi-structured interviews used in this study elicited personal narratives, throwing light on how journalists cope with the strains of their work.

This article has also sought to show how these subjective experiences are influenced by institutional, social, and cultural contexts. It argues that since wartime reporting is usually undertaken on behalf of media organizations, the answers or solutions to these emotional challenges also must lie within the industry’s professional framework. The implicit rules regarding feelings within these contexts restrain the experience and expression of emotion among journalists. To help journalists better cope with heightened emotion, I proposed that media organizations should alter these implicit feeling rules. For example, media organizations should develop a more acceptable repertoire of emotions, offer a platform to journalists to share their emotions, or allocate more time for emotional processing and coping.

Finally, the research suggested a need for media organizations to view emotional challenges as a collective problem and thereby allocate more resources toward it. Instead of leaving emotional processing to the individual, media organizations must make a community-wide effort to help the emotional wellbeing of journalists. Some journalists themselves explicitly expressed a need for more training programs, precautionary measures, and recovery schemes.

Broadly, these themes also suggest that power and inequality within the profession can manifest itself in the media organization’s view of the role of emotions. An international media organization with a broader network and more resources might be better equipped to help its journalists. At the same time however, newsroom management decisions can prove critical in supporting war reporters, regardless of the institution’s size.

About the Author: Gayatri Sabharwal is a consultant on gender for the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) at the World Bank HQ. She earned her B.A. in Political Science from Yale College, and her M.Phil. in the Sociology of Media and Culture from the University of Cambridge, U.K. Her research interests include wartime journalism, gender, and social protection and social safety nets – with an emphasis on how social protection systems target and benefit women.

End Notes

1.     Thomas L. Friedman, “Like Father, Like Son,” The New York Times, February, 14, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/opinion/friedman-like-father-like-son.html.     

2.      “74 Journalists Killed: in 2012/ Motive Confirmed,” Committee to Protect Journalists, 2012, https://cpj.org/data/killed/2012/.  

3.     Dashiell Bennett, “The Life of a War Correspondent Is Even Worse Than You Think,” The Atlantic, July 10, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/life-war-correspondent/313463/.

4.     Ibid.

5.     Anthony Feinstein, John Owen, and Nancy Blair, “A Hazardous Profession: War, Journalists, and Psychopathology,” American Journal of Psychiatry 159 no. 9, 2002, pp. 1570-1575.

6.     Alan Bryman, Social Research Methods, 4th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 415-429.

7.     I created fifteen first-cycle codes or parent themes across all eight interviews. The parent codes are “conflict regions,” “coping mechanisms,” “emotional state during event,” “human elements of reporting,” “motives for reporting/ rewarding aspects of reporting,” “negative emotions,” “physiological challenges,” “positive emotions,” “physical threats/potentially dangerous events,” “precautions,” “preparation,” “psychological stress/mental health challenges,” “social and family life,” “workplace stressors,” and “noteworthy language and imagery.”

8.     Interview with P#1 Gayatri Sabharwal. April, 2018. 

9.     Interview with P#2, Gayatri Sabharwal. April 2018.

10.  Interview with P#3, Gayatri Sabharwal. April 2018.

11.  Interview with P#4, Gayatri Sabharwal. April, 2018. 

12.  Interview with P#3, Gayatri Sabharwal. April, 2018. 

13.  Interview with P#5, Gayatri Sabharwal. April, 2018.

14.  Interview with P#6, Gayatri Sabharwal. April, 2018. 

15.  Interview with P#1, Gayatri Sabharwal. April, 2018.

16.  Interview with P#6, Gayatri Sabharwal. April, 2018. 

17.   Daphne Bugental, Leonore Love, and Robert Gianetto, “Perfidious Feminine Faces,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17 no. 3, 1971, pp. 14-18.

18.  Paul Ekman, “Facial expressions of emotion: New findings, new questions,” Meeting Report 3 no. 1, 1992, pp. 34-38; Arlie Russell Hochschild, “The sociology of feeling and emotion: Selected possibilities,” Sociological Inquiry 45 no. 2-3, 1975, pp. 280-307.

19.  Jean-Marc Dewaele, Aneta Pavlenko, “Languages and Emotions: A Crosslinguistic Perspective,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 25 no. 2, 2004, pp. 93.

20.  Lisa Feldman Barrett and Maria Gendron, “A Role for Emotional Granularity in Judging,” Onati Socio-Legal Series 9 no. 5, 2019, pp. 557-576.

21.  Ibid.

22.  Sam Dubberley, Elizabeth Griffin, and Haluk Mert Bal, “Making Secondary Trauma a Primary Issue: A Study of Eyewitness Media and Vicarious Trauma on the Digital Frontline,” First Draft News, 2015, https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/making-secondary-trauma-primary-issue-study-eyewitness-media-vicarious-trauma-digital-frontline/.