A new report from PEN America shines a bright light on something unsurprising to anyone who’s worked in a newsroom in the digital age: Reporters are on the receiving end of tremendous amounts of online abuse, abuse that sometimes crosses over from the screen into their offline lives.
‘“The nature of the attacks and the intimidation tactics have evolved,” says Viktorya Vilk, director for digital safety and free expression at PEN America. “Online abuse is becoming a significant safety hazard. Everybody from scientists and academics to election officials and journalists are experiencing this problem. Journalists have a particularly impossible double bind that they face. They have to have an online presence to do their job in this era. On the other hand, the more visible they are, the more likely they are to be under attack.”
Working with Susan McGregor of Columbia University, Vilk and Jeje Mohamed, senior manager for digital safety and free expression at PEN America, analyzed interviews from around two dozen journalists, mental health experts, HR employees and people who work in security to get a sense of not only how much online abuse is happening among journalists, but how much support is available for those who have been on the receiving end.
“Throughout our work, we have seen ways in which people have been affected by online abuse. We have seen how journalists have been attacked, whether for who they are or the story that they’re covering,” Mohamed says. “We also saw how disproportionate the effects are and how they are targeting specific people for specific identities. … It can be a form of hate speech. It can be in the form of rape threats and sexual assault threats and other tactics. It’s hard for people. They need support.”
It’s also difficult to talk to family members and friends who are not part of the journalism industry about such abuse, because the solution offered might be to leave the profession that so many feel is more a calling than a standard career, she says.
There’s also a lack of understanding within the industry of how bad the problem is and how seriously it should be viewed.
“What became clear to us is that journalism is a high stress, high trauma profession. But we don’t think of it that way still, institutionally,” Vilk says. “We think nurses, firefighters, EMTs, those people are doing really high stress, high trauma work. But the truth is that, for journalists, it’s also like that. But we don’t necessarily have the same structure of support or the same expectations around the risk that we do in those other fields. People think, ‘OK, if you’re going into a war zone, of course there’s going to be risk and trauma.’ But honestly, if you cover mass shootings, if you cover civil unrest or end up in a place where there’s civil unrest, a climate disaster, you’re going to experience secondary trauma. If you’re reporting from your desk but people are threatening to kill you every two days, you’re going to experience trauma.”
The report details not only the lack of support for reporters to help work through those traumas and build resilience, but it calls on newsrooms as a “duty of care to protect and support their reporters, whether they’re staff or freelancers, if they’re being attacked for the work they’re doing for their employer, for their job. There’s definitely been more understanding of that in the industry, especially when it comes to physical safety, but there’s room for improvement, especially when it comes to digital safety and online abuse,” Vilk says.
Viktorya Vilk and Jeje Mohamed wrote a report for PEN America with Columbia University’s Susan McGregor that focused on using peer support to reduce harm and increase resilience against the online abuse of journalists in the U.S.
