It’s an assignment most reporters have had, and dreaded, during their careers: Someone has died in a crash or been killed in some terrible way, and the editor wants to talk to the family.
Reporters will tell themselves that this is part of the job, a public service to allow the family to share their loved one’s story one more time. Maybe the family will agree and speak a few words; maybe the door will be slammed shut in the reporter’s face. But at least the attempt was made.
Very little, if any, thought is given to the harm caused by making that contact, says Tamara Cherry, a former crime reporter with the Toronto Sun who now runs her own PR firm to help victims of crimes and trauma deal with the media. She just released a book, “The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News,” the result of surveying more than 100 victims and survivors of violent crimes and talking with two dozen reporters about the impact of trauma on their lives.
“I didn’t initially set out to write a book, just as I didn’t initially set out to be a television reporter,” says Cherry, who originally wanted to write for a snowboarding magazine when she first ventured into journalism. After a few years with the Toronto Sun, and then with CTV, a network in Toronto, she started her company, Pickup Communications, in 2019.
“I launched a PR firm to support survivors and relevant stakeholders. In the beginning of the pandemic, I launched a research project on the impact of media on trauma survivors and, ultimately, I expanded it to examine the impact of trauma on members of the media. That was one thing on my long list of things I wanted to do.”
But Cherry was surprised to find very little research that looked into the long-term impacts of media interactions on people who had dealt with trauma.
“In May 2020, I started with a survey for survivors of homicides and traffic fatalities,” she says. “Those were the ones I was most likely to go knocking on their door” when she was a reporter. In talking with people in person, or after receiving surveys, she expanded her research to include victims of sexual violence, mass violence, human trafficing and the family of someone who had gone missing and was presumed killed. Then she decided to expand her research further, to include reporters, to learn how their interaction with the victims affected them as well.
“There was so much self-reflection that happened through this process,” Cherry says. “I was confronted by all the ways I got things wrong as a crime reporter when I thought I was getting them right, when I thought my very good intentions were good enough, that it was naturally a book. For me, the book became something where I would love for this to be mandatory reading in journalism school and every victimology program.”
Among Cherry’s key findings was that families who are contacted by reporters, especially in the immediate aftermath of their loss, rarely had a positive experience and, looking back, wish they had done things differently.
“We think we have the best intentions. If we just get that grieving mother on TV, the girlfriend who saw her boyfriend stash the gun will call in a tip,” Cherry says. Other reporters feel like they need to show dramatic images of body bags in their coverage in order to illustrate the crime in a powerful way. “It turns out, that’s very harmful. Reaching out in the immediate aftermath when the cloud of shock is so thick. The more I researched the impact of trauma on the brain, these people were in no state to make an informed decision whether they wanted to talk to me. It was very exploitative, what I was doing, and I didn’t consider it.”
Learning about the long-term trauma on both sides of the interview made Cherry hyper aware of the harm she’d done in the past and made her keenly aware of wanting to avoid doing more harm with her book.
“The hardest part for me was, after I was done writing the book, I was going to be reaching out to each of these survivors to ask if they wanted to read what I’d written before I sent it to my editor for the first round of editing. The weight of responsibility I felt to get it right for them was so crushing, the weight of responsibility to not cause further harm by that point. … My perspective completely changed.”
