Human memory is susceptible to errors and distortions. This may sound cliché (Loftus, 2005), but the practical meaning of this is illustrated by, for example, the devastating effects of mistaken eyewitness identifications (Sagana, Sauerland, & Merckelbach, 2012), the far-reaching consequences of innocents who falsely confess to crimes they never committed (Kassin & Gudjonsson, 2004), and the tragedy of adults who erroneously come to believe that they recovered very early memories of abuse experiences (Loftus, 1993). As for these alleged recovered memories: there was a fierce...

Understanding how trauma appears in media and impacts vulnerable communities is important for researchers from various fields to investigate. However, to begin to understand this specific type of media, we must ask not what is traumatic media but what traumatic media looks like. This article evaluates the spectrum of what, I term, trauma(tic) media looks like.