Susanna Griso's cruel question

As we've seen in other disasters, the Adamus train crash has led to absurd and even cruel television decisions to fill the airtime when reliable information is scarce. The number of victims still being identified demands caution, but impatience leads many current affairs programs to speculate in order to keep viewers entertained.

Across all the networks, multiple layers of information are being built up, with interviews of survivors who are repeatedly asked about their memories of the moment of the accident and everything they experienced around them. Some appear repeatedly on different programs, and in some programs, the victims are given the opportunity to talk to each other and exchange circumstances and details of what happened. Public Mirror They even asked a passenger if he remembered the woman who sat opposite him and if she was still seated at the time of the impact. The missing woman's daughter had appeared on another program on the same network asking for information about her mother, specifying her seat number and the carriage she was traveling in. The program confirmed that they had consecutive seats and therefore placed the responsibility on him to publicly share information about the passenger who had been sitting opposite him during the accident.

The survivor later explained a very relevant point when justifying his memory gaps:You gradually piece together the records, but you no longer really know if it's because of what you hear in the press, on the radio...For victims, the media can standardize the narrative. They fill in the gaps resulting from trauma and manipulate the memory of what they experienced.

Susanna Griso asked that same passenger:How do you feel when you think that sitting in one seat and not another saved your life? What people in adjacent seats might have died while you survived...?"At the bottom of the screen they put a sign that said: "Travelling in one seat or another can determine your destination."

Beyond its poor taste and lack of sensitivity, from a journalistic standpoint, the question is ethically reprehensible. It forces the interviewee to relive the trauma from a position of responsibility. It's like asking them why they are alive and someone else isn't. This approach can trigger a clinically documented psychological response: survivor's guilt. It's linked to post-traumatic stress, an aspect that television networks often overlook when interviewing survivors. Journalism seeks witnesses, but they aren't necessarily prepared to face an interrogation. The recklessness of asking a survivor about their fate seems to imply some supernatural or superstitious reason for their survival and forces them to take a stance on their own destiny and whether it was more just or deserved than that of the other passengers. It mythologizes the catastrophe and, undoubtedly, aims to provoke an emotional reaction from the witness. In a vulnerable state, this cruel question can be a wound.