New research shows that 52% of journalists in Israel who covered terror attacks in the course of their work suffer from symptoms of serious post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) requiring clinical intervention. This statistic is 5.5 times higher than the statistic for serious PTSD symptoms in the general population, which is estimated at 9.4%.
The new study, named “Post-Trauma Among Reporters Who Cover Terror Attacks,” was carried out by Dedi Markowitz, a master's degree student at Ben Gurion University's Journalism Department.
The researcher determined that the percentage of PTSD sufferers among Israel's journalists is similar to that of their colleagues in the United States who spent time reporting on the Iraq war. “It can be estimated that the journalists' heightened exposure to trauma is the result of the fact that they are tasked with a defined mission of witnessing and reporting,” the researcher wrote. “Within this framework, they are exposed to many details which are not seen by other forces that are called up to the scene of the attack for rescue purposes – including sights of dead and wounded, [and] reports from hospitals and victims' stories, over which the journalists compete while focusing on the traumatic, the painful and the exciting.”
Low Awareness
Markowitz warned that the severe trauma is accompanied by low – possibly even nonexistent – awareness of the problem among journalists and the news organizations that employ them. This raises the possibility that the news coverage by those journalists may be biased because of their exposure to trauma. This bias could be present even in coverage of subjects that are not directly connected to terror attacks and disasters, the researcher surmised, and may go completely unnoticed. The nature of such bias, if it exists, requires further study, he added.
In the introduction to the study, Markowitz noted that Israeli reporters who report terror strikes expose themselves to various degrees of emotional trauma. The first trauma is the direct kind, caused by their presence on the scene of the attack as “functional witnesses,” whose job is to observe the carnage and destruction and collect information about it. The secondary but longer-term trauma is what is known as PTSD, which could later affect their coverage of routine news as well.
No Treatment Received
The study, which was carried out under the guidance of Dr. Tzvi Reich of Ben-Gurion University, shows that unlike other crews that arrive on the scene of terror attacks, such as emergency rescue teams, doctors, paramedics, social workers, police, fire crews and more, Israeli reporters have thus far not received serious psychological treatment, with the exception of IDF Radio reporters.
The study encompassed 60 journalists with various fields of specialization, including police, military, health and regional reporters, who covered terror and war occurrences over the last six years. Most of them were exposed to numerous terror attacks. Some witnessed more than 10 such attacks.