This morning at Melbourne University, a gathering of journalists, editors, photographers, Emergency servies representatives, journalism students and journalism educators came together to discuss the just completed report on the Centre for Advanced Journalism’s first major research project,: how the media covered the Black Saturday fires. The report will be posted soon on the Centre’s website and I urge all those interested in the media and journalism to read it. I believe it is a compelling and unqiue report in which media people who covered the fires reflect on their work, on the ethical challenges they faced, on their dealings with victims and survivors and the authorities and on the effects on them personally of covering such a major disaster.
It was a fascinating morning. Panels of journalists responded to the report and recounted in the most vivid way, their memories of the fires. Gary Hughes from The Australian, who was both a survivor of the fires and a reporter, talked about the way survivors are emotionally and even physically drained and even traumatised by being exposed to the media. Jon Faine talked about the absolutely fearsome challenges of responding to people who called in for advice on what to do as fires approached their homes. All the panelists had thought about the challenges they faced, in particular, the way they approached victims and survivors for interviews, photographs and television footage. What came out of this discussion most clearly for me, is that journalists are not trained to deal with victims of trauma, that inexperienced media people in particular, were confronted with situations they were not equipped to handle and that there are no agreed ethical rules for media people in covering disasters like the Black Saturday bushfires.
At the same time, I was once again–for I had conducted some of the interviews with the media people for the research project– struck by how the majority of the journalists had thought alot about the ethical foundations of their work. The other thing that struck me was how deeply the media people who covered the fires were affected and how, months later, some of then still find it hard to talk about their experience. I think media companies need to do more work on how to respond to their staff when they send their people out to cover traumatic events.
There’s much much more in the report–and from the event –that needs discussion and examination and I hope that will happen. While this research project was focussed on the media people who covered the fires, what is now needed is a research project that looks at how those who were covered by the media, on reflection, feel about this coverage and how it affected them and their communities. That’s one of our projects for 2010.
I will come back to the report in the coming days and weeks. Meanwhile, read it and of course I welcome comments about the report on this blog. Indeed, I invite people to write considered responses to the report which I consider publishing here. Not just on this project either, but on any media matter of interest. I hope this blog can develop into a forum for discussing a wide range of challenges and issues facing journalism.