The wisdom of the owls
By Editor on March 14, 2008 8:50 pm
In the second part of a series on the challenging emotional situations journalists face, Gavin Rees examines the techniques seasoned reporters use to interview people in distress.
Read Part 1: So how did you feel then?
YESTERDAY I HAD sketched the edges of a large hole at the centre of journalism training: while rookie policemen and medics receive structured tuition on how to deal with people in distress, cub reporters get very little, if any, practical guidance.
This is a pity. Because nearly all journalists will at some stage work with people who feel stigmatised or have experienced some form of trauma.
The good news is that many seasoned professionals handle such potentially challenging encounters with skill and sensitivity. And they do so in ways that are likely to get them far better material than those who practice less emotionally sophisticated interviewing techniques.
Although it may surprise many of them, what they have learnt to do after years of experience is not dissimilar to the communication skills taught to medical students at the beginning of their careers to equip them to deal with patients. Journalism educators are largely unaware of what they have picked up, which makes it hard for them to pass these skills on systematically.
The ones I interviewed for the study ventured that interviewing people in distress is largely a matter of “common sense”. Maybe it becomes so. Elsewhere in our conversations though, they admitted they had often lacked that common sense when they started out.
Picking through the 40 long interviews I conducted with educators, journalists and psychology professionals, a simple pattern emerged. Broadly, seasoned interviewers, be they medics, police officers or effective hacks, develop their skills in four areas.
1. They listen well
I talked about this yesterday. Psychologists call this ‘empathic’ or ‘non-judgmental’ listening. It has nothing to do with being ‘nice’ to the interviewee, or agreeing with what is said. Rather, it is about giving somebody the space to speak freely.
Obvious as that sounds, journalists are often guilty of ‘bad’ listening. Time pressure, the need to formulate the next question, and sometimes just a sense of guilt for being there can all get in the way
An inattentive journalist can ‘marginalise’ subjects, making them feel it is their fault they reacted emotionally to the trauma. On the other hand, an overly attentive journalist who strives too hard to demonstrate the extent of his or her own sympathy can ring false and be equally alienating.
2. They understand their role
In the workshops we organised, journalism students often felt they had to ‘fix’ the people in distress they were confronted with. Some made extravagant assurances along the lines of: “Don’t worry, I am sure it’ll be all right”, or even drifted into active counselling.
The desire to help is very human. But effecting a quick cure of a traumatic stress response is beyond the reporter’s remit. The best way a journalist can serve an interviewee is by reporting his or her story fairly and accurately. Misreporting, however, can do real damage.
Interestingly, doctors and psychiatrists are trained to avoid rash promises when they triage patients. They talk about working with the patient towards symptom reduction, rather than promising quick fixes for problems.
3. They begin well and end well
Journalists, just as medical professionals, benefit from learning how to build good boundaries around their encounters with people in distress. It is vital to learn how to contain an interview, to give it a clear and appropriate beginning and ending.
In the bomb scenario we described yesterday, the student journalists often forgot to identify themselves and explain why they were interviewing. The lack of clear introduction creates a muddiness that can unsettle both the interviewer and interviewee. If a journalist states his or her purpose with clarity, the source, who might be alarmed and confused, is less likely to feel that s/he is about to be taken advantage of.
The way an interview ends is also important. When somebody is describing a traumatic experience, being abruptly cut off in mid-flow can be very disturbing. If it is a breaking news story, and time is really short, then a warning to that effect at the beginning of the conversation can make a sudden ending feel more explicable.
If the interview is longer and centres on a past trauma – as in the hypothetical of the man who saw his parents being murdered we started with – another strategy works well.
One would start discussing the man’s childhood before the trauma, a period he is likely to feel relatively secure about. From there, the conversation could be steered carefully to the day of the murder. We don’t know how much the man has talked publicly about the event. He may be a youth worker who campaigns against gun crime with hundreds of media appearances under his belt. Or it could be his first time talking to a journalist.
Whatever the case, any detailed discussion of a trauma as foundational as this is likely to be intense. So one needs to take time before entering that emotional arena, and for the same reason, one also needs to return the discussion back to a safe place before the end.
To achieve this, one could talk about a recent achievement or an outing the man has planned with his kids. Or one could look at the latest photo album. There are plenty of possibilities – even a neutral chat over a cup of tea can do it.
Rushing off, leaving somebody wallowing in what could be the most distressing moment of their lives is shoddy. In some cases, it may be actively damaging as well.
Learning how to manage an interviewee’s expectations of what happens after the interview is another important side to ending well.
Many of the ex-reporters I talked to had a closing ritual, which foreclosed any possibility of misunderstanding. They would summarise the main points, to check for misunderstandings; give their contact details; and wrap up with some comment along the lines of: “I hope I can put a quote from you in, but I can’t guarantee it. I don’t have much space. Saying that, thanks to our conversation, I understand the situation better now. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me.”
That way there is far less chance of somebody feeling aggrieved if their name is dropped.
4. They practice effective questioning
Question technique is more complicated than is usually assumed, so I will restrict the discussion here to just one aspect.
The students we talked to knew emotionally vivid quotes would help make their pieces arresting. But to get those, they tended to ask questions which overtly fished for emotional responses. You can well imagine the response of the gangland killing witness if he had been asked: “How did you feel when you saw both your parents shot in front of you?”
The veterans say the best way to navigate this is to ask sparse, factual questions. What did you see? What did you do then? Who else was there? Indeed the more emotionally heightened the situation, the less ‘feeling’ an experienced interviewer would invest into the words that form the question. It is simple, open questions that are more regularly rewarded with natural and vivid answers, because they give people the space to speak freely.
The four headings above are not an exhaustive list of do’s and don’t’s, but rather a schematic for the areas we need to build skills training around. For more recommendations, see Dart Centre’s trauma and journalism guide.
THE techniques described here would work in any interview situation. There is nothing that radical about them: they embody elements of the traditional tradecraft that many journalists would recognise.
Having said that, there is one major difference: the list gives explicit attention to the emotional dimensions of the interview situation, a crucial aspect trainers in the past have been reluctant to address.
This goes to the heart of the issue. Journalists who are good at doing difficult interviews with people in distress get there because they learn how to avoid doing or saying things that might occasion feelings of guilt in themselves.
By placing clear boundaries around the interview situation, managing the interviewees’ expectations, asking simple questions, and above all by listening well, an interviewer discovers there is no reason why a traumatic interview in any sense need be damaging to the interviewee. With that knowledge in hand it is much easier to move on to the next story.
When they start out, students don’t necessarily know this. Watching them in the workshops and talking to them afterwards, it was clear that many felt highly conflicted about what they were doing and worried they could be doing harm.
Why the students feel like this is hard to say for certain, but two notions may be at play here. One is perhaps the fear that disclosure is automatically dangerous: a person talking about their emotional state might come apart all over the journalist. How do you stop them? What are the consequences of bringing this painful story out into the open?
A second reason could be the feeling that there is something underhand about making money out of somebody’s misery. His pain is my gain. They feel they are being extractive when they should be helping.
In contrast, seasoned professionals do not assume that what is good for the journalist is necessarily bad for the source. In the classic death-knock situation, where a reporter is assigned to investigate a recent death, the family of the deceased could be waiting for the knock on the door. They might appreciate a sensitive write-up of their loved one in the local newspaper. Or they may feel differently. But the better a journalist understands the possible range of reactions, the easier it will be to handle an angry brush-off.
Some fear that being attentive to emotion makes one liable to writing gushy, sentimental copy. I would suggest the reverse might be true. The more aware journalists are of the emotions that lie under the surface of the situations they report on, the less likely they are to write about them inappropriately. It is the dead-eyed cynics who are more likely to smuggle their own feelings into their work without being aware of it, be it personal enmity or mawkish sentimentality.
A casual glance at any newspaper will reveal it to be already full of emotional language and descriptions of how we imagine others to be feeling. As journalists, we are great gourmands for collecting emotional colour. We spice our stories with it, because we know it makes our copy more appetising to consumers.
This is just as true of the broadsheet as the tabloids. While the latter concentrate more on sex shockers and grizzly crime exposés, the same preoccupation with the emotional lies hidden in the up-market press’s accounts of the back-stabbing and Faustian meltdowns that attend life in the corridors of power. It is interesting.
However, often that reporting could be far more accurate, in the sense of providing a truer account of the emotional experiences of the people we write about and film. A crude emotive shorthand – for instance, reducing things to just rage and tears – does not leave much room for understanding the emotional nuances of somebody’s predicament: how they got there, what might happen next, who else might be in a similar situation.
As journalists, we also play a strange double game we remain largely unaware of. We like to pretend that we, ourselves, are impervious to the kinds of emotional experiences we report on. We prefer to see ourselves as cool titans, the uber-rational reapers of facts. This contradiction puts a strain on young journalists when they start out: it is hard for them to report accurately on the feeling of others, if they are not supposed to have any themselves.
Given the confused relationship journalism has with the emotional, perhaps it is no wonder many of the young journalists we coached during our workshops initially found it hard to reconcile to being good at their job – ‘getting the story’ – with a sense of how they should respond as human beings to somebody affected by trauma. But there needn’t be any contradiction. The workshops and the interviewing techniques described above teach that emotional self-awareness can make them more resilient in the face of other’s distress and improve the accuracy of their reporting.
This is the last part of this series. Read Part 1, So how did you feel then?
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
Your Thoughts (0 Comments)
Submit Comment
