Watching coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing seemed to have a lasting effect Kelvin Ma/Bloomberg via Getty

When something terrible happens in the world, it’s not uncommon to scroll through social media or flip through television channels in search of news coverage. But such media exposure may fuel post-traumatic stress symptoms for as much as two years afterwards – and could also drive someone to consume further distressing media.

“With high-consequence events where we don’t know why they happened, there’s a fundamental drive to want to consume information until you get your head around it,” says Kenneth Lachlan at the University of Connecticut. “It may be a function of threat avoidance or wanting to return to some kind of rational understanding of the world around us.”

Roxane Silver at the University of California, Irvine, and her colleagues surveyed a representative sample of more than 4400 US residents in the days following the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Each person was also asked how many hours of related media coverage they consumed in three follow-up periods: six months after the bombing, on its second anniversary and five days after the 2016 mass shooting in the Pulse nightclub in Florida.


After the first survey, the team found that those previously diagnosed with mental health conditions or who had experienced violence first hand consumed more media coverage about the Boston bombing, and also experienced more symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

On average, the people surveyed consumed about 6 hours of media a day about the Boston bombing immediately after the event and a little more than 3 hours per day of media about the Pulse shooting.

Those who sought out more media about the bombing – whether or not they had a history of mental health conditions – were more likely to have trauma-related stress symptoms, such as upsetting thoughts, flashbacks and emotional distress, six months later. Two years after the bombing, such people were also more likely to worry about other events of mass violence or terrorism occuring in the future.

The team found that such worries were linked to consuming more coverage of the subsequent Pulse nightclub shooting. “We have not seen any habituation over time,” says Silver. Instead of becoming desensitised to media coverage of traumatic occurrences, the respondents became more emotionally responsive to such events in the future.

“I’ve been studying this topic for 19 years, but I was surprised about the power of media in transmitting stress beyond the directly impacted community,” says Silver.

She says viewers should try to moderate their media consumption during distressing events, and that media organisations should be mindful not to share sensational stories.

Minding your own media consumption is useful because that may be the only thing you can control in these situations, says Lachlan. “I don’t think mainstream media outlets are going to stop showing media that draws eyeballs,” he says. “That’s counter to the business model.”

Journal reference: Science Advances, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aav3502