Too much front line for reporters?

In an endless cycle of write-and-repeat, journalist Tom Lansner typed up stories about missing persons, shocking atrocities, and mass graves while serving as a war correspondent in Uganda in the early 1990s. After observing scenes of carnage, he feared - or perhaps hoped - that his eyes were failing him.

"Sometimes, I questioned myself," recalls Mr. Lansner, now a professor of international relations at Columbia University. "Did I really see these things? Could I really have seen something so terrible, so bad? Sometimes I would wonder, 'Wow, could this be real?' "

Lansner's experience is hardly unique among the generations of reporters who have offered firsthand accounts of armed conflict since at least the time of the Civil War. Many have questioned their grip on reality and struggled with despair. "I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused," wrote famed World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle. "The hurt has become too great."

During the halfcentury between the war- reporting stints of Lansner and Mr. Pyle, there were few, if any, places for correspondents to turn for support. Over the past decade, however, journalists across the world have begun to acknowledge their own susceptibility to emotional trauma - on the battlefield, amid the destruction of 9/11, or in the living room of a mother grieving for a dead son. Special training for war correspondents, once nonexistent, has become more common, and some journalism schools are teaching students how to cover tragedy sensitively and cope with their own emotions.

"It's something that has been discussed throughout the industry," says former war correspondent Andy Alexander, Washington DC bureau chief for the Cox newspapers chain. "There's a growing realization that it's something we have to deal with, and not simply the reporters who cover wars but reporters in all sorts of traumatic experiences."

Awareness of the impact of violence on journalists has been growing in fits and starts for several decades. In the Vietnam era, correspondents added a new level of personal observations to their coverage, particularly in books published after the war; female reporters explored their own experiences, and some wrote of the horrors they faced when captured.

The recent practice of embedding journalists with US troops in Iraq has also heightened awareness, as these reporters have stayed close to combat and been regular witnesses to disturbing scenes.

Before Iraq, the most recent impetus for change was the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The explosion shook the building of The Daily Oklahoman newspaper, killed relatives of staff members, and tested the way reporters looked at themselves.

"We think we can withstand anything as journalists," says managing editor Joe Hight. "We're supposed to be observers, reporting on the scene, and we're not supposed to be affected by it as the victims are."

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