KNOW NOW:
War Reporting Classroom
The Anatomy of Trauma Journalism
This is Mount Lebanon, where massive oaks soar above thousand year old cedars along the Mediterranean coast. The tree-lined mountain range is a witness-cum-survivor of more wars, invasions, occupations and violent incursions than anywhere else during the past millennia. It is here where many of the world’s leading conflict correspondents have reported on the vastly disproportionate turbulence and terror shaping this small nation in the Levant.
Among them is native Nora Boustany, the essential voice in and out of Beirut during the 1990s. As a young, dedicated and singularly female newshound, she moved back and forth from the city’s Muslim west to its Christian east when few dared travel in a country mired in civil war. University of Missouri-trained, Boustany wrote and broadcast what she saw, heard and verified, engendering both trust and threats from all of the warring militias, the factions and the government. Her esteem among foreign correspondent peers earned her the prestigious George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honors. Today she teaches the trade to aspiring journalists at the American University of Beirut, where her expertise and students’ urgent needs meet at an inflection point in her class on Trauma Journalism.
Headline news dominates class discourse and this fall, Israel/Gaza replaced Ukraine under its zoom lens. From Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Latin America and Europe, the students are acutely aware “people have clashing narratives and truths,” Boustany says, adding quickly “I try to make them face the reality that pain is pain, insecurity is insecurity, loss is loss. And crimes of war are crimes of war.”
She prods her Trauma Journalism group to step out of their own biases, to gather and assess facts, to secure the information needed for a full story while remaining safe from the fury each side unleashes. If students can cultivate this ability as the most disturbing news in their own region unfolds, they are well on their way to becoming first rate journalists. “My Palestinian student worries about civilian friends and relatives in Gaza and how to help them cope,” Boustany says. “I think the class is hardest on her, but she is learning how to think critically about everyone’s role in this current mess.” When students recently met to address international conventions about the rules of war, the young Palestinian commented that what Hamas did on Oct. 7 was wrong, since it targeted civilians and children.
Those "narrative wars" Boustany talks about in class, the battle of stories created by opposing parties, are what Johns Hopkins Dean of the School of Advanced International Studies James Steinberg warned about at a recent K/NOW Dialogue. Former Deputy Secretary of State and past White House National Security Council advisor Steinberg points to narrative wars, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that are highly vulnerable to hijacking by propagandists. This danger, he insists, should push journalists to put a premium on due diligence, to get the facts from primary sources, and to recheck the facts with multiple sources.
Now, fast forward to digital warfare designed to obscure what's real and what isn't, and the stir it can create among these and other young, passionate and career bound. As student citizens of the Middle East, now is the most volatile and ominous time they've known, their personal stakes make their own objectivity practically out of range. Boustany is clear on her role: “The rage about this past month in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank unleashed visceral toxicity and fear. I am trying to prod my students into thinking of the future, to tell stories that convey truths, to help communities transition from unending conflict.”
This, while graphic 24-hour news reports on the war's fallout are “addictive viewing rituals” for the AUB student-body with many conversations outside school walls. Boustany encourages classmates to "vent concerns about realtime potential genocide and ethnic cleansing” as a steady flow of images land on their screen showing people fleeing on foot, carrying white flags; bombs lighting up the night sky. Network coverage to mobile phone snapshots from people on the ground, the flow of images is nonstop and disturbing, Boustany says. "They share and forward interviews with surgeons and physicians performing operations without anesthesia as hospitals shut down."
Discerning facts in the confusion of violence, together they examine the scope of crimes of war and grasp the international convention on genocide. There are plenty of primary sources, even oral historians, because while formal international adjudication of conflict is many wars old, it is still new enough that the earliest global justices and prosecutors are alive. Luminaries all of them, they are reservoirs of seasoned perspective. The first ever US Ambassador-at-Large for War, David Scheffer, who led the establishment of the International Criminal Court, and later war crimes tribunals in former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Cambodia, weighs in with this on Israel/Gaza.
That scholarship, that trained eye, that ground experience, even citizen journalists' cellular photograph captures, are now up against Artificial Intelligence’s master manipulation of reality. The immediacy, the very authenticity of information and images is perhaps as great a challenge for news gatherers in conflict zones as beating back their own stubborn biases, given the alarming difficulty in determining what’s real and vital and what’s fabricated and menacing. Boustany contends her students "know that AI and ChatGPT hallucinate and provide false answers and narratives. It is a big concern at AUB," she says warily. "I do not allow it at all. My students know that they have to come up with original reporting."
Back in the United States at the University of Missouri where Boustany trained, and all across the United States, where public belief in media coverage continues to sink, campuses are embroiled in ways to contain vitriolic demonstrators and incendiary language. Boustany’s Beirut media class is different. “Oddly, there is no hate speech whatsoever. They are learning how to hold two or three ideas, or perspectives, as they observe the same situation. My course is about how a reporter goes about collecting information, vetting it, checking it, putting it together, and writing it. Striving for the best content, the safest strategy when interviewing victims of trauma in a conflict zone, with the fairest perspective.”
“There are two clashing approaches to realities on the ground and [journalists must] understand that victim and victimizer each have their own baggage of trauma. Reaching that baseline of humanity is one of my principal goals.”
Boustany’s constant classroom refrain “show, don’t tell” is code for zero tolerance for editorializing. Students’ first drafts often have bias, which Boustany always deletes, replacing with a dismissive note that such comments “would not pass any editor’s desk.” Under five feet, the professor is diminutive in size but looms large on campus. If she is tough, she is also attentive, keeping long office hours to help students cultivate skills that require them to have the immediate intimacy of seeing, hearing, feeling the reactions of others without somehow coloring the reporting with their own emotions. “They are at the beginning of their journalistic journeys. I try to press into their brains and conscience that there are two clashing approaches to realities on the ground and to understand that victim and victimizer each have their own baggage of trauma. Reaching that baseline of humanity is one of my principal goals.”
Her pedagogy is not the prevailing one among professional colleagues on campus, but Boustany presses on with her students: "I remind them that the families of Israeli hostages, men, women and children are agonizing over the fate of relatives held in Gaza’s network of underground tunnels. We talk about generational trauma of Israeli Jews and of Palestinians, whose bitter experiences have not been adequately addressed or acknowledged. It is a rare platform of exchange and an exercise in looking at different narratives. I urge them to think about the day after, and what kind of world they want to bring their future children into." The course unwinds with transitional justice, how societies grapple with the legacy of human rights abuse, and its importance in stabilizing societies and nations, post-conflict. They explore how traumatized people and communities reckon with the past and begin to build a future.
"I know that my approach is singular on campus and risky, but I believe in it," Boustany says, "I have seen too much war." American University of Beirut leads the region in its graduates’ employability, preparing thousands bound for the job market each year. AUB grads will join the international media corps already focussed on the Middle East, and if the professor has the influence she hopes, her budding trauma journalists will probe for facts and context that allow their listeners, readers, and viewers to form their own opinions.
DO NOW:
Probe the quality of US coverage and frame the issues with provocative views from Frontline, Columbia Journalism School and West Virginia University. In the recent Media Insight Project, over half of those surveyed blame the press for misinformation; an even greater number insist the press can and must redress it. See how American journalists work to raise their own standards. Is the impact of Artificial Intelligence on your general news intake beginning to worry you? Information Week's top technologists covering AI are one step ahead with this startling disclosure. Follow Sue Hendrickson's work at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to see AI's impact on “democracy, human rights, and societal well-being.” Giving unfiltered reporting on conflict zones is an ethical matter, and the International Center for Journalists shows why with these tips for both journalist and news consumer. Everyone can use a handbook of facts, no matter how long they’ve covered this conflict: click here for an important must read for all journalists and a practical primer for everyone on the Middle East.
Amy Kaslow