I made a point of not watching this slaughterhouse video, even though for the past two years I’ve been doing a Leverhulme-funded study on how different audiences respond to jihadi execution videos. I’d already watched my fair share of jihadi snuff, and I doubted that watching another monstrous ISIS film would have enhanced my understanding of the group and its propaganda. (ISIS, let us not forget, has used children in videos to kill hostages and has filmed a group of men in a cage being lowered into a swimming pool.)

This is the bit in the article where I’m supposed to tell you about how watching copious amounts of jihadi atrocity porn has left me mentally scarred and traumatised, and how even the most innocuous thing can trigger a memory of watching a captive getting his head cut off, blown off or crushed by a tank. It’s the bit where you’re supposed to marvel at my bravery in taking on such a dark subject, martyring myself in the name of public social science: “I watched these godforsaken videos so you didn’t have to…”

Well, that’s not my “truth”, and we’ll get to that in due course. But in the meantime: what are we to make of the increasingly repeated claim that doing research on any one of the vast litany of horrors in human history is a mental health risk? Such statements must, of course, be taken seriously. But by foregrounding the experiences of the researcher at the expense of history’s actual victims, do they not risk veering into moral narcissism?

As part of my research, I’ve interviewed jihadism scholars, researchers and journalists who have exposed themselves to this material over an extended period. The overwhelming conclusion that emerges from these interviews is, as you would expect, that watching jihadi atrocity videos exerts a mental toll on those who do it.

Michael Krona, a media scholar researching ISIS and Salafi-jihadist propaganda at Malmö University in Sweden told me: “I think the videos with kids as executioners could be the worst thing that I have seen. That really got to me emotionally, especially as a parent myself.” Referring to the material he was watching and documenting back in 2015, when ISIS was pumping out more than 200 videos, radio programs, magazines and photo reports a week, he said: “It was impossible for me to switch off. I had to start counselling around that time when it became too much. It took a long time before I could learn to structure the exposure and to make it emotionally bearable.”

Other researchers have testified to similar feelings. “There are moments, I find, where my everyday life is invaded by these scenes,” jihadism scholar Charlie Winter has said of ISIS’s worst atrocity videos. Seamus Hughes, who researches extremism at George Washington University, has likewise said: “You look at violent imagery all day, and it gets to you. And you want to tell yourself it doesn’t, but it does.”

I can readily understand and empathise with their reactions; when I first started doing my own research on ISIS video-propaganda, I experienced several months of night terrors, which I duly treated with alcohol and antidepressants. (I don’t recommend this.)

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But the temptation to classify these unpleasant experiences as clinically traumatic seems to me not just overblown but also a category-error, mistaking spiritual harms for psychological maladies to be diagnosed and treated. This certainly seems to be the case with the historian and journalist James Robins, who, in a recent article, claimed that “the phenomenon of the historian traumatised by history remains unstudied and is not widely known”. A few sentences later, like clockwork, comes the bit about Robins’s own torments:

“After writing a book on the Armenian Genocide, a process that took me five years, I found it impossible to slip comfortably into sleep. All kinds of catastrophes visited me — still visit me — in that space before dreams: ugly visions, jarring scenes from my research.”

I have encountered similar expressions of anguish — mostly on Twitter, of course — from colleagues in my own field of criminology, especially those who visit prisons, detention centres and interview victims of abuse. Some have even published peer-reviewed articles about their experiences of trauma.

Of course, anyone who probes these accounts with a sceptical eye risks being denounced as an insensitive prick. But it is hard to avoid the air of moral narcissism that hangs over some of these trauma accounts. After all, the moral narcissist is, as Ed West recently observed, someone who manages to make everything, including the most atrocious deeds and crimes in faraway places, all about them.

The historian Karen Halttunen brilliantly captures the type in her article on “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain”. Discussing the English humanitarian reform movement of the eighteenth century, Halttunen described how it was inspired by a “cult of sensibility”, with its heroic exemplar being “the man of feeling” whose “tender-hearted susceptibility to the torments of others was the mark of his deeply virtuous nature”.

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The so-called “man of feeling” was also a man full of shit, buying and showing off the “tableau after tableau of pitiful suffering” for the purpose of, in Halttunen’s words, “enhancing (and demonstrating) their virtue”. And it didn’t take long for others to notice their hypocrisy, as Halttunen records:

“Oliver Goldsmith ridiculed sentimentalists for weeping over the sufferings of helpless animals even as they consumed at dinner the flesh of six different creatures in a single fricassee…. John Keats and William Hazlitt would soon charge that the poetry of sensibility actually explored not the feelings of the imagined sufferer but the feelings of the spectator watching that sufferer and was geared to demonstrating the spectator/reader’s own exquisite sensibility.”

However, the most serious charge levelled against the humanitarian sentimentalists was that they were secretly getting off on spectacles of suffering; that they were voyeurs. “The literary scenario of suffering, which made ethics a matter of viewing the pain of another, from the outset lent itself to an aggressive kind of voyeurism,” Halttunen noted. The reformers were aware of such criticisms, and therefore “filled their writings with close descriptions of their own immediate emotional response to the spectacle of suffering, to demonstrate that their sensibilities remained undamaged”.

This, I think, helps to explain the proliferation of trauma discourse among academics interested in human malevolence and cruelty: their public proclamations about how their research has left them traumatised serves to deflect or pre-empt any suspicion of voyeurism and resultant desensitisation. They are decent men and women of feeling, after all.

But there’s also another, perhaps even greater, incentive at work: namely, the seemingly inexorable temptation in our culture to proclaim a victim status. By portraying their research-work as potentially dangerous and traumatising, privileged academics who would otherwise have little or no warrant for claiming victimhood can do so, and thus enjoy the deference and accommodation that comes with such a status.

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As one well-known war correspondent told me, on the condition of anonymity:

“There is a bit of a trauma sweep-stakes that has come into existence, where one of the ways that you can get credit is by describing how much you’ve been hurt, which creates an incentive for people to over-perform the wounds that they’ve received…

When I’ve given talks on ISIS, at least at every other talk there’s someone who asks about how awful it’s been for me, and I will always be honest about that. I’ll say I would not recommend that anybody do this who’s sensitive to these types of things, but I’m okay. I’m worse for having seen these things, but it’s not something that’s going to destroy my life. I know what the reaction of those audiences will be when I say that. They are hoping that I say that this has really fucked me up. There are correspondents who, throughout their whole careers, have made a lot of hay out of saying how war has really screwed them up, even though they were never well to begin with. You don’t get a book contract by saying I went to these horrible places and was fine. Nobody’s going to read that.”

But at least war correspondents, however prone some may be to self-pity and self-dramatisation, ventured out to war zones and, in many cases, put their lives on the line in doing so. By contrast, the trauma merchants of the ivory tower have taken no such risks, physical or moral. And yet here they are engaging in online bonding rituals over the profundity of their moral sensitivities.

For if trauma is to mean anything, it has to mean real suffering that comes from direct and close confrontations with death, dying and mortal threat. However uncomfortable it is to conduct research into dark episodes of human history, it isn’t remotely comparable to witnessing real horrors or being on the receiving end of them. That isn’t to doubt the sincerity of those researchers who claim to be traumatised. But it does strike me that the symptoms of psychological distress they report, from sleeplessness to anxiety to palpitations, are really vestiges of moral shock and disturbance.

 “Every time I saw an execution by ISIS, and felt my soul diminished, that feeling of diminution also reminded me that I still had a soul left to wound,” wrote Graeme Wood in a brilliant essay on his own experiences of watching jihadi atrocity propaganda. As I understand it, the diminishment Wood is referring to is the nasty realisation that, just like those poor souls whose grisly demise we have chosen or happened to watch, we, too, will die — even if it is in less violent circumstances. The problem with medicalising these universal feelings of dread and vulnerability is that it implies that they can somehow be “treated”, instead of accepted as an unavoidable part of life.

That war provided an important lesson for governments. If they could put reporters into uniform as ‘War Correspondents’ they could appeal to their patriotism to produce heavily censored, upbeat copy designed to boost morale — in other words, propaganda. (The initial idea of a ‘WC’ patch was abandoned in favour of ‘C’ for Correspondent.)

In doing so, the conflict ushered in “the modern epoch of government press controls and spin”, as Paul Moorcraft and Philip Taylor put it in their book, Shooting the Messenger.

The 100-year anniversary of the war’s end is a chance to assess its disastrous legacy for journalists: trading access to military operations for independent oversight of them. And to reflect that a plethora of inconvenient but accurate facts now emerging on social media offer a real alternative for journalists keen to uncover the truth.

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What is striking about the First World War is the extent to which journalists and the owners of the main British newspapers colluded with the government to keep up the morale of the nation and help it win the war. The leading accredited British journalists on the Western Front were all knighted for their services, but later some admitted that their published work, despised by the men in the trenches, was far from the truth.

Sir William Beach Thomas of the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail wrote in 1925: “I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written, for the good reason that it was untrue.” Another of the official reporters, Sir Phillip Gibbs of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Chronicle, wrote several books after the war to justify his partial, misleading reporting of events at the front.

The horrifying stories war reporters told were not to their readers but politicians and proprietors, often at private dinners back in London. Lord Rothermere, who co-owned the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, admitted: “We’re telling lies, we daren’t tell the public the truth, that we’re losing more officers than the Germans, and that it’s impossible to get through on the Western Front. You’ve seen the war correspondents [. . .] They don’t know the truth, they don’t speak the truth, and we know that they don’t”.

At another private dinner in London, Lord Northcliffe, who owned the Times, admitted that he suppressed news of military incompetence in the Dardanelles: “It is not wise to discuss this disastrous expedition in my newspaper, though the Germans are intimately informed of our impending catastrophe,” he said.

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This approach was shared by other proprietors. Staff at the Manchester Guardian became outraged when they discovered how much newsworthy information was being discussed behind closed doors between C. P. Scott, its proprietor and editor — today best remembered as the man who wrote in an editorial, “Comment is free, but facts are sacred” — and his close confidante, the Prime Minister Lloyd George. Scott’s own staff were outraged when they realised more than once that their own boss had failed to share with them newsworthy information he had received from Lloyd George days before.

Over the 100 years since the end of World War One, the British military and government, like the war-fighting institutions of other liberal democracies, notably the United States, have framed the reporting of the wars as a patriotic responsibility for journalists. It’s the war reporters’ eternal dilemma when covering a conflict in which their own country’s armed forces are participants: are they official eyewitnesses or independent critics?

It is possible to draw a direct line from official manipulation of the media in World War One to that of World War Two. When the British Empire declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, the British government reinstated World War One’s Ministry of Information in order to sustain civilian morale, censor the media and promote propaganda.

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The government saw the BBC as a vehicle to transmit government propaganda. The first Director General, John Reith, had no illusions that the government wanted the BBC to be independent. Reith wrote in his diary: “[The government] know that they can trust us not to be really impartial.”

Nor were British reporters in World War Two impartial: they believed they should help the military beat Hitler. However the two world wars were national endeavours – the wars of choice the British government has fought since, were not. Nonethless, access to the battlefield has usually been on the military’s terms and a heavy public relations spin is normally attached.

Why does this matter? News organisations have frequently presented misleading versions of events on the ground, from the supposedly bloodless air bombing campaign in the First Gulf War of 1990-91, to the one-sided depiction — mostly told by reporters from the soldier’s point of view — of the gruelling British campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Access is the main mechanism by which governments have curtailed journalists’ ability to tell the truth. Not all notable foreign correspondents go along with officially organised reporting, of course: the BBC reporters Allan Little and John Simpson don’t sign up for officially sanctioned access. Many more reporters have decided that military sanctioned access is better than none at all. They have, with varying degrees of success, done their best to negotiate with media managers in the field.

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Now, however, reporters have alternative ‘access’ to areas of conflict. Social media platforms give modern journalists — and indeed the public — powerful new mechanisms for uncovering and checking facts. All over the world, officials are less able to hide difficult news.

Online investigators Bellingcat, who teamed up with professional reporters on the ground in Russia to identify the would-be assassins of the Skripals in Salisbury, are the clearest example of this. Members of the online collective have also used freely available software and crowdsourced amateur investigators to attribute responsibility for shooting down the Malaysian Airlines MH17 plane in Ukraine in 2014 (Russia) and the Sarin gas attacks in Damascus in 2013 (it was the Syrian army).

In this way, professional journalists have enlisted non-professionals to sidestep controls imposed by the men with guns on the ground. And the quality of the material produced in this way is of the highest standard, as shown by the adoption of Bellingcat’s evidence by the police detectives investigating MH17. Significantly, the steps by which this information was verified have also been published.

It is the antithesis of the cosy communication networks operating in elite circles during World War One. Channel 4 News’ chief reporter Alex Thomson describes the inevitability of pesky facts appearing online– as he puts it, they “push up through the cracks in the pavement”. The result is that many of the important facts from modern news events are less easily contained and controlled. The hundredth anniversary of the “war to end all wars” has provided the opportunity to recognise both its toxic legacy for journalism and, thankfully, that there now exists an alternative.