Trigger warning: This story is about trigger warnings

Just the chosen set of facts, screened for your mental safety and health.
With a warning.

A new NEW YORK TIMES article has summarized societal change perfectly with an opening headline in a post about Governor Andrew Cuomo: 

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Trigger Warning: This article contains information and details about alleged sexual assault and/or violence, which may be upsetting to some readers.

The dreaded trigger warning.. placed on your Sunday morning news cycle again.

The TIMES article goes into great detail about now three women who are accusing the Governor of unwanted harassment.  It talks about Democratic party reaction in the state of New York. And despite that prominent trigger warning at the beginning, goes into very little on the actual factual evidence or detailed allegations being levied against Governor Cuomo.

As a matter of fact, the only times the word sex comes up is in a sentence stating three women alleged sexual harassment, and also when the TIMES provides the number for the National Sexual Assault hotline.

Interestingly similar articles about Cuomo, those that detail the nursing home scandal of undercounting COVID deaths, don't include any trigger warning. In those instances, there is information that people in the state worked behind the scenes to hide the true numbers of coronavirus deaths in the spring and summer of 2020. That apparenty does not warrant any deep concerns among readers.

 

x x x

No trigger 90s

Some aging dinosaurs who were young in the 1990s may recall the era of Bill Clinton. Allegations of rape and sexual assault were being made by various women. The media soaked up the sun with Bubba and ignored most--something that came into light in a new TikTok generation when people 'woke' to the former celebrated President's personal history.

But despite "blue dress" talk nightly with Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, and Tom Brokaw, there were no trigger warnings. Not even warnings to hide your kids ears if they don't know what the word semen means yet!!

TIME magazine and NEWSWEEK ran cover stories featuring Monica Lewisnsky and Bill .. 

Years later that placed an exploding New York City skyline on their covers as we saw the twin towers destroyed on 9/11...

There was a decade of war images, beheadings, and abuse at Gitmo with images on nightly news. Sometimes a brief warning.. sometimes not.

But now trigger warnings are becoming more common and, in a sense, could lose their meaning.

This NEW YORK TIMES article is proof. While the subject matter of the situation is uncomfortable, isn't all news uncomfortable? At least the earth shattering, world breaking events? 

Most of the time when you live through history, you also live through trauma.

Does that mean historic photosets from Vietnam or previous eras would have been erased from news rooms because they would trigger society? Is it better to let society not know certain pieces of information because it would be uncomfortable? No.. 

Not at all.

But we are in an era where trigger warnings will be more and more likely on most news coverage.

COVID made us do it

The brief history of trigger warnings can be traced back to the COVID pandemic. During the summer of 2020 news briefly turned to a dramatic explosion in Beirut. There were images of similar to what a nuclear bomb explosion would have looked like. Dramatic on the ground footage of explosions however were left off the news. Instead you can search for them on Twitter--until that service took many off of their page for policy violations. 

But many esteemed journalistic researchers began to ask if trigger warnings were needed. And they also wondered if showing hardcore images of breaking news was actually more harmful to the reader, and if it would make us "less compassionate" to plight.

The old days of gathering the facts and reporting them are gone. Instead now we have all turned into armchair experts on how to better or worsen societty.

This was reported in June, 2020: According to the Pew Research Center, two thirds of US media consumers report that they feel “worn out” and “fatigued” by the news this year—a claim backed up by experts, who point out that prolonged and consistent exposure to graphic media can have negative effects on one’s perception of the world around them, not to mention their own mental health.

MORE:

“People are distressed when they watch graphic imagery which can last, but it’s not always a bad thing to be distressed by horrible things that happen in the world,” says Dr. Elana Newman, Research Director for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

She believes that exposing audiences to mass disasters through media coverage is important so that those who wouldn’t have otherwise known about them can grasp the gravity of the issue.

But by being aware of tragedies, Newman, who also is a professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa in Ohio, says that there is a correlation between how much news a person consumes and symptoms of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

“The degree of which you are involved in that event, whether you have lost somebody or something, is a contributing factor,” she says. “People who have had similar experiences to what they see on the news are likely to be triggered.”

MORE, with our emphasis added:

In her opinion, a considerable amount of photography is insensitive graphic media content, that creates more harmful narratives than awareness.

But taking empathetic photos of disasters is difficult for any photojournalist no matter the intention, and it may not be possible to please everyone while successfully completing journalistic objectives.

Afterall, without them, how would we know what is going on in the world?

“It would be great to get to the point of not requiring those images and it would be even better to get to a point where society has reformed itself and these traumas no longer exist,” said Professor Lauren Walsh the Director of the Gallatin Photojournalism Lab at New York University, pointing out that graphic images should not be required to validate tragedy and social inequality.

However, since social inequalities and other crises do exist and probably will continue to in the future, Professor Walsh says that a deep understanding of how Black and Brown bodies have historically been represented in the media is vital knowledge for journalists to study in order to prevent harmfully graphic images in their news coverage.

“Think about the implications of how this image will affect the community that it’s representing,” Walsh says. “Show something that conveys the severity of the issue but with dignity and respect.”

And once journalists live up to their part of doing homework on the communities they cover and doing so with an empathetic eye, Dr. Newman says that a shift in terminology could be beneficial for minimizing harm on the audience’s part.

For one, she says that she doesn’t particularly like the term “trigger warning” because of the stigma that it carries and the potential to be used as motivation for audiences to want to view troubling content even more. Newman also says that it is unclear whether or not these warnings are even effective with their goals of protecting audiences.

Here is a trigger warning before we write the next statement: There will never a  time in the future were trauma does not exist in life. If we eliminate hunger and poverty, hurricanes will still occur. And if we learn to control the weather and stop climate change, an asteroid will lurk.  Advancement of society only occurs when an intelligent populace learns to grapple with difficult things. Learns to talk.. learns to live together. 

Instead we are trigger by simple facts. We go to social media to cancel things that make us uncomfortable. 

Meanwhile real true trauma still lurks. We can ignore that trauma when we see the trigger warning and live within our safe bubble of pleasantry. 

But the danger is that the outside world still exists.. and sometimes bursts the safe bubble.