Journalists are caretakers of the public interest. But when a community experiences a devastating trauma, lines of responsibility are less clear-cut. Are journalists responsible to the news consumer or the community experiencing the trauma? Which notion of public interest assumes precedence? How does journalistic responsibility translate into action when residents experience pain, but editors clamor for on-the-spot coverage? Creating spaces for reflective practice can assist journalists in considering principled ways of covering trauma. This paper examines the reactions and reflections of seven journalists who responded to research exploring the impact of media coverage on a rural community where a high-profile murder had occurred. These journalists, using reflective practice, pondered the challenges of covering trauma, the evolution of journalistic responsibility and the implications for journalism educators teaching students who will inevitably cover traumas when they are working in the field.
This paper describes the impact of extensive journalistic coverage on a small community in Quebec that experienced the murder of a teenage girl by a local man. Press coverage of the case was intense, as journalists converged on the small rural town to cover the story and the subsequent arrest of the suspect and his parents. In presenting the voices of both local residents and a journalist, this paper illuminates the secondary trauma and symbolic violence that can result from some forms of news coverage of a traumatic event. Five key themes regarding the impact of the media on community residents arose from the data: alienation from the community, anger at the media's public construction of the community, intrusion on community life, intrusion on the private processes of grief, and triggering renewed feelings of loss and grief. Implications for journalists are discussed, including being aware of the dynamics of symbolic violence and secondary trauma and incorporating positionality, empathy, and reflective practice into their reporting praxis.
North American psychiatric literature describes the
current method of psychiatric diagnostic assessment as "phenomenological";
however, it is unclear what phenomenology 1 means in this context. This paper investigates the meaning and impact of some of the major philosophical and psychiatric definitions of phenomenology on contemporary psychiatric assessment. Employing a comparative analysis of selected definitions of phenomenology, this paper argues that North American psychiatric assessment does not reflect any of these definitions of phenomenology. Instead, within the context of psychiatric assessment, phenomenology has taken on an idiosyncratic, clinical meaning of signs and symptoms. However, this does not mean that phenomenology has had no impact on North American psychiatry. This paper contends that phenomenology has made contributions to psychiatry, particularly in the area of psychotherapy and especially in self-psychological psychotherapy. The importance of the concept of empathy within psychotherapy is evidence of the continuing influence of philosophical phenomenology on psychiatry. This paper concludes that phenomenology can provide an important complementary perspective to the dominant methods of North American psychiatric practice.
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