Carrie Rentschler

As part of my research studying the U.S. victims' rights movement over 20 years ago, I noticed connections between the trauma researchers working around the movement and, increasingly, in journalism, around the direct and vicarious forms of trauma that some reporters experience on the job. My research in this area examined the adoption of trauma training in U.S. journalism education, the shift in talk of harm to journalists from that of danger to trauma, and the gendered frameworks in which security companies directed safety training to non-embedded journalists.

Definition of journalists' safety

Journalist safety is often regarded in terms of the mitigation of risks in the field, but equally if not more important to the safety of journalists and news workers more broadly speaking are working conditions that protect and uphold news workers' human rights and rights as workers, strong structures of legal protection(s) for the press, and equity protections in the field. In contexts where these structures and conditions have been attacked and diminished by people in power and in movements that see press attention as a threat, news workers bear increasing risks to their lives and livelihoods, risks born more heavily by those who are gender and sexual minorities, racial and religious minorities, and those with less job security. In these ways, the safety of journalists and news workers is intimately tied to more robust social security for everyone.

Future plans for research on journalists' safety

My future plans might include research into the safety of, and risks born by, citizen journalists as part of my inquiry into mobile phone witnessing and bystander intervention frameworks on social change. Additionally, bystander recording technologies have increasingly been articulated to the documentation of risk and danger and their recordings serve as key witnessing texts in legal suits and news coverage of violence. This project on bystander technologies bears on issues of journalist safety as one of the ways in which violence committed against news workers is sometimes recorded.