Chiding the military establishment for failing to provide adequate aftercare for wounded servicemen is a favourite media pastime and the psychological toll of conflict among service veterans has been popularised by the press. What is less well known – indeed, virtually invisible to the public gaze – is the psychological toll with-in the news media itself as journalists and photographers deliberately expose themselves to the risks and horrors of conflict to seek out the grotesque in pursuit of the big story and the best picture.
Journalists Under Fire is not a textbook of post-traumatic stress disorder or psychological trauma: rather it puts flesh on the bones of the sanitised, sterile descriptions of psychopathology in the academic literature. This book makes for uncomfortable reading: sometimes disturbing and upsetting but always compelling, Feinstein uses personal narrative to vividly and chillingly describe the psychological effects of war reporting on those journalists who bear witness to the brutality and inhumanity of conflict. The social consequences of trauma are starkly depicted: broken families, broken careers, broken lives; all too often sublimated and disguised by a fast-living, hard-drinking machismo lifestyle and culture that goes with the territory.
What is most disturbing, is not so much the incidence or nature of psychopathology among journalists, but the fact that so few of them get any sort of help or treatment. News organisations (who have a duty of care no less than the much-maligned military establishment) typically turn a blind eye and offer little in the way of support. Then there are freelancers who lack any of the benefits and protection that a concerned and responsible employer should provide.
Remarkably, this is the first published investigation looking specifically at journalists as a vulnerable group. It should give news organisations pause for thought and a stimulus to get their own house in order, before casting brickbats at the military. If they fail to act, and with no end in sight to the endless stream of war and terrorism flashed across our TV screens and news media, increasing numbers of naive young men and women will be put at risk without warning, preparation or aftercare merely to satisfy the insatiable public interest and voyeuristic appetite for war reportage.
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