By Maria Murriel
Last year, around the time sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson was banned from racing in the Tokyo Olympics after testing positive for marijuana use, I had been thinking about context.
In terms of my work as a journalist, I was thinking about the grace context bestows on people who’ve been accused of wrongdoing. Typically we see this when a white man is accused of major crimes like mass shootings or sexual assault. Less often, we see context benefitting story subjects who come from historically marginalized groups. I chalk this up to the news media’s lack of trauma-informed journalism practices.
In my opinion, a trauma-informed news media would have made it their responsibility to contextualize Sha’Carri Richardson’s marijuana use as a coping mechanism for the death of her biological mother. They would have abstained from debating whether the athlete was wrong to cope with the news in whatever way she chose, and would have focused instead on whether the rule that disqualified Richardson was outdated given marijuana’s increasingly decriminalized and legalized status across borders.
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Coverage of this athlete’s Olympic journey stayed with me because, in my eyes, it was a microcosm of a deeper, impactful issue within journalism: The news media subconsciously influences public opinion, which sometimes reverberates to public policy and law. So, if all mainstream news media took a trauma-informed approach to reporting, could the public potentially develop a more compassionate opinion toward people historically labeled “criminals” or in some way “bad” by the media? Could we collectively unlearn shame in the public sphere, especially when it comes to people from marginalized communities?
Focusing for brevity on local TV news stations’ crime coverage, most viewers in urban markets will come across mugshot after mugshot, often of Black or Latinx people suspected of committing the day’s local crimes. This information is presented without the context — read grace — of the reasons Black or Latinx residents of that city may be driven to rob, burglarize or assault others. Those reasons are often tied to systemic disenfranchisement leading to poverty, untreated mental health conditions, and generally unhealed wounds manifesting as inappropriate behavior. That’s certainly a lot to unpack between commercial breaks, but it seems like journalistically vital information to provide viewers who would otherwise discard the suspects as criminals, or “the enemy.”
In my experience reporting on municipal politics and organizing, this anti-crime sentiment materializes into proposals for ordinances that criminalize homelessness, make it harder for incarcerated people to re-enter society, or for low-income families to find secure housing. These are just some examples, but that’s the kind of local policy that doesn’t only lack compassion or trauma-informed governing — it actually contributes to the problem of crime by further edging people away from resources.
So, if local TV news coverage can be linked in this attitude-informing way to our local governance and legislative approach, does it not follow that trauma-informed local TV news could inform neighborhood organizers’ attitudes toward the side of compassionate policies? If, instead of only mugshots, viewers were offered historical and statistical data about the city’s investment or disenfranchisement of the suspect’s neighborhood, or the retention rate of its schools, or the rate of hunger and poverty in the area, I could see those viewers beginning to link that context to the suspect’s alleged actions. And if they heard that story enough, it might begin to click that something had to be done about the root cause instead of just the crimes.
Maria Murriel is a journalist pursuing the Trauma Research Foundation’s Traumatic Stress Studies Certificate. She is co-founder of Pizza Shark Productions, a podcast network and production house working toward radical inclusivity in media. She lives in New Orleans, where she works on storytelling as a healing practice. Read more at mariamurriel.com.
