So how did you feel then?
By Editor on March 13, 2008 7:35 pm
Just how do you look a man in the eye and ask him what it was like to watch his parents being killed? Or ask a survivor how it was when a bomb exploded? In this two-part series, Gavin Rees explores the challenging emotional encounters journalists negotiate in their work-life — and how to get the best interviews when emotions run high.
IN JOURNALISM MOVIES, there is always a wise old owl at hand to mentor junior colleagues. If you aspire to that role, here is a scenario:
A student knocks on your door. He or she wants to write about a series of brutal gangland killings that happened 20 years ago. The student has secured an interview with someone who was 12 at that time and witnessed his parents being murdered. The young journalist is apprehensive and seeks your advice.
What would you say?
It is a swine of a hypothetical, I know. And it had a visibly halting effect on some of UK’s most experienced editors and journalism educators who contributed to a study into how journalists are trained to interview people in distress.
Fact is, hardly any are.
Car accidents, violent crime, suicide, life-threatening illness and all manner of human conflict, these are the daily meat of much of our journalism. Nearly all journalists at some stage in their careers will find themselves working with the bereaved, targets of violence, survivors of accidents, the terminally ill, or people facing other challenges — addiction, debt, business failure, to mention just some of the more obvious.
Yet scant attention is paid to interviewing those affected by trauma. In contrast the police and medical professionals routinely give their recruits structured training in how to talk to the vulnerable and how best to interpret accounts that may be distorted by the raw experience of distress.
The educators I interviewed for the study had all done their fair share of tough stories. Dunblane, Lockerbie, Soham, the Rwandan genocide, the Arab-Israeli conflict and the war in Iraq all came up as situations that had stretched the journalists’ capacities to report human distress effectively. We tend to associate trauma with war and terrorism, but those I talked to had often found domestic stories placed them in difficult positions as well.
One journalist remembered being asked by his editor to phone the father of a missing girl, who had been ‘outed’ by The Sun as a convicted sex offender, quite coincidentally as it turned out. The question he, as a young assistant producer, had been told to record for broadcast was: did you kill your daughter? Not easy, and not the kind of conversation, he had ever been trained to lead.
Another remembered a situation when he, as an editor, made a snap decision to broadcast a tape that arrived only minutes before the lunchtime bulletin. It had been rushed from a house fire, where a reporter had found a man with burn injuries in the garden.
Short of time, the journalist began recording. But the conversation ran out of control, as the man described how he had been unable to save his wife and daughter from the advancing flames. The father said he heard his daughter crying in her room.
“How do you deal with this kind of escalating level of appalling detail that begins to emerge?” the editor asked. “What’s driving him completely and utterly is that he needs to explain to his wife and family that he tried, that he tried to get them out, but he failed. He can’t bear the thought of anybody thinking he didn’t try… The microphone’s running and you’ve got to shut him up in the end.”
In the rush to go on air, the father’s self-accusing outburst was broadcast — a decision the editor still regrets.
The importance of listening
Clearly journalism can expose professionals to challenging emotional encounters and difficult conversations. The journalism educators I talked to were all well aware of this.
But what concrete advice do they give? Their answers to the gangland-killing hypothetical we started with tended to focus on the pre-interview build-up, the security implications, the necessity of doing proper research, etc. They skirted around, even ducked, the straight question: just how does one look somebody in the eye and ask what it was like to see his parents being killed?
But this is the kind of detail the students I spoke to wanted to know. The educators — and most students — I interviewed spoke of the importance of building rapport and being understanding. A typical response was:
“The journalist would need to be sympathetic to the victims’ feelings — perhaps be able to think ‘in their shoes’ so that s/he can really consider if his or her actions are going to worsen the emotional trauma of the victim.”
So most journalists are eager to be responsible. But that in itself doesn’t get us very far. The question remains: how do you provide a safe space for an interviewee to speak about his or her experiences? And can you do that and still get the information you want?
Of the 27 educationalists I presented the gangland scenario to, only five said they would communicate to the student something about the importance of listening.
This is interesting. All the more so, because most of the 22 who did not talk about it had given me the impression at other points in their interviews that good listening was a crucial part of what they did during the course of their work. Maybe they thought it was too obvious to emphasise to the student.
But good listening isn’t automatic. It needs work. Just how do you listen well when you are short of time, trying to ask all the questions you want to ask, and horrified or just plain embarrassed by the subject matter?
Working around distress is analogous to working in bad weather. You have to accept the likelihood of getting wet. The conversation will be difficult; in some cases it may make the journalist feel quite bad. But if you can accept that, and try to listen better, focus a fraction harder, then your discomfort is likely to slip into the background.
In fact it may even create a virtuous circle: the better the interviewee feels listened to, the more freely and vividly she or he will speak. Result: a better story for the journalist, a safer experience for the interviewee. If that happens, the content of the conversation, and not the journalist’s feelings about it, becomes the matter at hand.
‘Detachment’, a slippery lexical unit
Parking your own feelings to one side is not the same as suppressing them. Seventy-eight of the 159 journalism students we surveyed at the universities of Bournemouth, Falmouth, Roehampton, Huddersfield and Cardiff either “agreed” or “strongly agreed” with the statement that “journalists should try to cut themselves off from their feelings” when interviewing survivors from a train crash.
This is a superstition that needs addressing. Struggling to smother your own responses is rather like holding a conversation while trying to secretly strangle a cat in a sack. The process is usually visible from the outside. Interviewees pick up very quickly when journalists aren’t concentrating on what they are saying and distraction is fatal to building effective rapport.
Often the journalists I spoke to used the word ‘detachment’. That’s a slippery little lexical unit that causes much confusion. Detachment is surely good if what one means by it is dispassionate reporting. Most of us would not like to read copy that is all about the journalist’s own emotional reactions; we want to know what the people in the story are going through.
On the other hand, if by detachment one means severing the channel of emotional understanding between witness and reporter, we start heading into the territory of a complex phenomenon psychiatrists call disassociation.
A journalist who advocates extreme detachment, demanding rigorously of himself “that I must feel nothing”, may in fact be preventing himself from hearing fully what the interviewee is saying. Over time, if a journalist is regularly dealing with emotionally tough material, the emotion-smothering approach may also have a deleterious effect on his/her well-being.
Of course — and this needs underlining — that doesn’t mean there is an obligation for a journalist to feel particularly affected when listening to somebody in distress. Feeling comparatively little in such a situation is not unusual. Different stories affect different people in different ways.
It’s okay to find this difficult
To give students a taste of all this, we put some through a ‘live firing exercise’. They had to interview members of the public — actors coached to respond in a certain way — after an ‘explosion’ in a football stadium.
The interviewees they met displayed different traumatic stress reactions. Some were so affected that very little could usefully be gained by talking to them. Others were distraught but had key information, which they would disclose providing they were interviewed in an emotionally intelligent and precise way.
At the start many students found the exercise immensely challenging. They had hoped to ask calm, collected questions with the detachment that journalists in the films always seem to possess. But it didn’t quite pan out that way. As soon as they were confronted with the distress of strangers, they became involved. Some felt ensnared by the demands they believed were being made on them. As one put it:
“I was much more conscious of my own behaviour during this workshop than I have been in any other interview.”
The result? Eliciting information became harder. Some students became tongue-tied or asked rambling questions; others tried to ‘fix’ the people they were talking to, crossing over from journalists to carers. During the first few attempts they antagonised their interviewees by forgetting to identify themselves properly and asking inappropriate how-did-you-feel-when-you-were-blown-up type of questions.
After each 10-minute interview, the coaches stepped in to talk to the students on how they could do better. One key message was: “It is okay to find this difficult. We do too. Just try to listen a little harder. Try and picture what they are describing. Focus on them, not your frustration.”
By the end of the workshop, the improvement was marked. It was obvious to observers that the questioning was getting better. And the actors — the best judges of all — reported becoming progressively more open and eager to volunteer information.
The key points to emerge out of the exercise were whether or not the students introduced themselves clearly, how they dealt with the requests for information made of them by the actors, and, of course, the kind of questions they asked.
As for the ‘witnesses’, what they valued above all was whether or not the students listened to them properly.
Some might suggest that there is a necessary conflict between sensitive interviewing and robust journalism. In discussing ’sensitivity’ in reporting, people often muddle the word empathy with sympathy. They fail to see that you can behave empathically towards people without being sympathetic to what they have done, or for that matter even liking them.
The students were inching towards a place where there was no apparent conflict between the rigours of professional journalism and behaving in a humane manner. The journalism educators I interviewed had arrived there themselves after years of trial and error. But mostly they had not thought concretely about how to pass these understandings on to their students — how to teach them what one might call the emotional practicalities of interviewing.
The problem here, of course, is that as journalists we rarely talk to each other about what it feels like to do emotionally challenging work. Our hesitancy makes it harder for us to pool best practice.
Does this mean we should parachute in psychologists or other experts to sort out journalism education? Not quite. Instead let’s look in more detail at what journalists who are good at reporting on trauma have learnt to do.
Part 2: The wisdom of the owls
Journalist Gavin Rees is the European Coordinator for the DART Centre. This series is based on a 15-month research project jointly undertaken by the Media School, Bournemouth University and the Dart Centre.
Image: Sunil Krishnan
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