The ‘detachment that comes with distance’ and how it has impacted storytelling during COVID-19
Journalists covering the pandemic have had to take extraordinary measures to ensure their own safety, creating a distance that gets in the way of the kind of personal journalism needed to tell the story of COVID-19.
That was one of the findings of a Thursday afternoon panel focusing on covering the pandemic safely at the Journalism in the Time of Crisis symposium hosted online by Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication.
The panel included Stefania Battistini of RAI in Italy, Erin Ailworth from the Chicago bureau of the Wall Street Journal, Adrienne Arsenault, co-host of CBC’s The National and Paula Fray, the CEO of Fray Intermedia, a media training company in South Africa. The moderator was Allan Thompson, head of the journalism program at Carleton and chair of the symposium.
The panelists also talked about the need for better training for journalists plunged into this kind of work and the irony that the most important stories — involving vulnerable communities disproportionately impacted by COVID — also pose the most danger for reporters.
Battistini is a reporter for the Italian public broadcaster RAI and reported when Italy was hit by the pandemic and through the lockdown that upended the country for months. In one of her most compelling reports, military vehicles were transporting coffins through the streets, a brutal reminder of the overwhelming impact of the pandemic.
Working through what she called “a new kind of risk,” Battistini said that the guidelines imposed by the pandemic forced journalists to re-evaluate their techniques for communicating with the public.
While journalists began donning protective gear and learning to report with extensions on microphones, Erin Ailworth from the Wall Street Journal’s Chicago bureau said that upon hearing about the pandemic she quickly stocked up on as much personal protective equipment in anticipation of the changes that were to come to her career.
“The extra gear is something I had to learn,” said Ailworth, who joined the Zoom call from a guest bedroom in her home where the closet has now become a storage area for protective equipment, hand sanitizer and riot gear. “After that, it was learning to connect with people if I couldn’t be on the ground.”
Ailworth is a veteran of covering hurricanes, natural disasters and riots for the Wall Street Journal.
Through lockdowns and public health protocols, Battistini said she was faced with limited access to information, directly impacting investigative journalism in particular.
“The excuse of infection has become a reason to ban entry [to institutions], which is really worrying,” she said. “It’s getting harder to ask questions”
Battistini’s concerns were echoed by Arsenault, a senior correspondent with the CBC and co-host of the National, who experienced reporting about health crises through Emmy award-winning coverage of the ebola crisis six years ago.
“There is a detachment that comes with distance,” said Arsenault as she noted the value to journalism of close contact with interview subjects.
Arsenault described interviewing an elderly woman at a long-term care facility from on the ground outside of the building, speaking through a window, and the sense of distance from the story that this physical separation creates.
“Bringing people closer in the storytelling has been very difficult for us,” she said. “There has been a journalistic transformation.”
Fray, who has worked as a journalist in South Africa since the apartheid era, shifted some years ago to media training. She noted how COVID has disproportionately impacted the poor in South Africa and that the most important stories required reporters to get out into vulnerable communities.
Watch the whole panel here.
