28 abril 2003

VITAMEDIAS
For Media After Iraq, A Case of Shell Shock: Now that the shooting is over, these questions hang in the air: What did the media accomplish during the most intensively and instantaneously covered war in history? Did the presence of all those journalists capture the harsh realities of war or simply breed a new generation of Scud studs? Were readers and viewers well served or deluged with confusing information? And what does it portend for coverage of future wars? [...]
Whatever its flaws, the war coverage was so close-up and relentless that there was no time for a credibility gap to develop, either for the Pentagon or the media. There was, instead, a comprehension gap, as viewers and readers drowned in information and struggled to make sense of the blur of events.
E, em termos futuros, o que sucederá aos jornalistas? Uma resposta científica: The battle we don't report: Despite the hundreds of studies and mounting official concern about the effects on the mental health of soldiers and civilians of being exposed to the vast emotional trauma of war, there remains astonishingly little research or interest in what happens psychologically to journalists covering such conflicts. But now a unique study of 140 war journalists, recently published in the prestigious American Journal of Psychiatry, has established that war reporters have significantly more psychiatric problems than a control group of journalists who had never covered a war.