Journalism Panel at Grady by Shannon Adams

                You have to be a human being first and a journalist second, said Diana Keough in a panel discussion at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication on Thursday.

                The panel, which was led by the president of the college Charles Davis, met in the Drewry room to discuss the morality and emotion that is involved in covering stories about trauma and tragedy. The panel consisted of Diana Keough, Jan Winburn, Moni Basu and Tim Crockett, all of which have had experience working in journalism under dangerous or stressful conditions.

“What we do is supposed to change us,” Keough said, “We get the best stories because we feel things so deeply.”

While journalists often experience distressing events and have to connect with those events emotionally, as professionals it is part of their job to distance themselves enough to cover the stories.

As an editor at CNN Winburn often sees reporters handling the stress and grief of the job.

“The most important thing I think you can do,” Winburn said, “is primarily to be a listener. What the reporter is doing in the field is being a listener and they absorb so much of that pain and so much of the questions that people have…and really what the reporter needs is someone else to release some of that to.”

Davis summed up what the other panelists said.

“We do carry some scars,” Davis said, “We’ve got to know enough about each other’s  lives to make sure we’re all okay while we’re doing the job.”

The panel also discussed how to handle vulnerable sources who have just been through traumatic experiences, or whose statements, if published, could negatively affect them in some way.

Winburn described a case in which a young adult woman spoke openly about her father’s PTSD and her mother’s attempted suicide. Winburn was faced with a moral dilemma about how publishing that testimony could affect the girl and her home life.

“You hit the gold, you got the interview, but what is your responsibility to that person and the people around them and to informing them as to what they’ve really signed on for?”

                Basu discussed soldiers she covered when she traveled to Iraq. She was interviewing soldiers who were still overseas about events that had happened only the summer before. She had to be very careful not to add to the ordeal that many of them were already dealing with.

“One of the most difficult things I had to do was talk to soldiers who had lost soldiers in their unit – guys that were their best friends, guys who were like their own brothers really,” Basu said. “There’s always the danger that you might make them relive their trauma in some way.”

The panel also agreed that, while sources who have experienced trauma can be extremely fragile, some are also tired of being tiptoed around and cannot wait to tell their stories. Keough often covers people whose traumatic incidents changed their lives. While many of the people around them may be waiting for things to return to normal, Keough says that these people have a whole new reality because of their tragedies.

“Once you actually established the fact that you were interested in hearing about that new normal for them, the floodgates just usually opened,” Keough said.