I Was A Crime Reporter For Nearly 15 Years. Now, I’m Speaking Out About The Trauma The Job Causes

I’m driving my kids to soccer when my oldest proclaims in a sinister voice, “Pennywise is going to kill you!”

This isn’t entirely alarming. My husband and I only recently put our feet down on this creepy-clown phase (brought on by a Grade 3 classmate with older siblings) after our youngest became convinced that Pennywise was hiding in his bedroom closet. No more drawing, writing about or talking like creepy clowns, we said. Our oldest protested. We sent him for timeouts. And things quieted down.

But that stubborn clown keeps creeping back into our lives. And so, on this ride to soccer, I turn down the music and reach for something else.

“It’s not just that you’re scaring your brother,” I shout to the back of our minivan. “Talking about bad and scary things all the time is actually bad for your brain.”

“How?” he shoots back.

“Remember when you used to watch me on TV?” I ask, harkening back to my days of reporting live from Toronto’s latest traumas.

Hesitation. “Yeah.”

“I know you thought that was pretty cool. But at the time, you were too young to understand the types of stories I was telling. Almost every single story I reported for nearly 15 years was about something bad.”

“Like what?”

“People dying. People being hurt. People being really, really sad.”

“Oh.”

“And guess what? I didn’t realize it then, but all those stories were actually hurting my brain. Because it’s not healthy to talk about and write about and look at bad things all the time. That’s why I have to take medicine every day. And go talk to someone every month. Because I actually injured my brain with all that stuff.” Silence. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes!” he shouts back, exasperated by this latest life lesson. “I get it!”

I turn up the music, buoyed by a renewed sense of optimism that the creepy clown may finally be behind us, while realizing that my eight-year-old cannot entirely get it. I hope he never will.

Journalism isn’t often mentioned among jobs with a heightened risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I left the profession in late 2019. The following spring, I launched a research project examining the impact of the media on trauma survivors and the impact of trauma on members of the media. A few months into that project, the idea that stories about trauma could and were harming the people who were telling them was inescapable.

And of course, it makes sense. The grind of daily news, particularly in large markets, is extremely stressful. There’s fierce competition, constant deadlines and the ever-looming threat of job cuts. Add trauma to your day, with no time to process your emotions between witnessing various horrors and sharing a sanitized version of those horrors with the world, and your brain can take quite the pounding.

There’s a name for the hurt that can come from being exposed to other people’s suffering: vicarious trauma. That vicarious trauma, I’ve come to realize, hit me hard.

But what I’ve had the most difficulty coming to terms with has not been all the suffering I witnessed. It’s been the suffering I now understand I caused.

Through surveying and interviewing more than 100 trauma survivors—first for my research paper and then for my book on the same topic—the evidence was overwhelming: Even if we care for and cry for and only want the best for the victims and survivors we report about, journalists are causing further harm. And we are doing so by the very nature of our newsgathering and storytelling process: showing a murder victim in a body bag; sharing dramatic video from the latest act of mass violence; approaching the recently bereaved at their homes, their schools, the spots where their loved ones died, then convincing them to talk to us, even though (quite often) they already told us no. The list goes on.

All these common practices, I learned far too late, are capable of triggering trauma responses in countless survivors. Heartbeats quicken, invasive thoughts resurface, cortisol levels rise, again and again, until some survivors cannot escape their heightened state of stress, until some survivors suffer long-term mental and physical health problems.

It was more than a year into my research that I first heard the term that put much of my unresolved, non-vicarious-trauma hurt into focus: moral injury. Uttered during a national journalism conference by psychiatry professor Anthony Feinstein, it gave me a new perspective on the hundreds of times throughout my career that I felt like garbage simply by virtue of doing my job.

While I was no longer hounding trauma survivors, my moral injury increased the more my research brought my past wrongdoings into focus. I showed body bags all the time. I played dramatic videos all the time. I convinced recently bereaved people to talk to me, even after they’d already said no, all the time. At some level, I knew this work was doing a number on my brain. But I didn’t realize the harm I could, and no doubt was, inflicting on the survivors already affected by these traumatic events.

Before leaving my journalism career, I did a lot of networking and scanned a lot of listings for what I considered “normal people” jobs—jobs that could pay me well, have me home for dinner and not haunt me with nightmares and an ever-present sense of impending doom. And yet, something kept drawing me back.

The result was my company, Pickup Communications, a one-woman public relations firm that supports trauma survivors and the stakeholders who surround them. (In crime reporting, a pickup refers to the practice of getting a picture of the homicide or traffic fatality victim du jour and ideally, an interview with their grieving family. Tamara, we need a pickup from the murder last night. Tamara, we still don’t have a pickup of the kid that was killed. Tamara, how did such-and-such news outlet get the pickup when you said the family wasn’t talking?)

As a crime reporter, I had a personal code to never make the most horrible day of someone’s life any more horrible and to hopefully make it a bit better. I now realize that it was likely rare that I achieved this goal. After all, it took me leaving the trauma beat to really learn about trauma.

I’m now on a mission to change the system by which trauma survivors interact with and are affected by the media, to the benefit of all stakeholders: survivors, journalists, investigators and yes, even you, true-crime consumers. I know that in order to fix a problem, we must identify it, study it, really know it.

While I’m sure I have more to learn, I do feel that I know this problem of the ways we tell and consume stories of other people’s trauma.

I hope you know at least a little bit of it now, too.

Tamara Cherry’s book, The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News, is now available from ECW Press.