Krull
The stories trickle out like tears streaming down cheeks.
Nick Schifrin, PBS NewsHour’s foreign affairs and defense correspondent, describes sitting in a graveyard sobbing after he stood with a parent in Ukraine while the body of the parent’s son was exhumed. Authorities needed to determine the ways the son had been tortured before he died.
Linsey Davis, weekend anchor for ABC World News Tonight, talks about reporting on the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and all the suffering, death and despair she observed there. She remembers just sitting in her car, shaken to her core, thinking, “What did I just see?”
Dave Cullen, the author of the bestselling books “Columbine” and “Parkland: The Birth of a Movement,” chokes up as he describes talking with those who lost loved ones in a school shooting. He describes how he battled depression after reporting on the Colorado school shooting and had to struggle to lighten the darkness it brought into his life.
We’ve gathered at Franklin College, the school where I teach, for the Inaugural National Trauma Journalism Symposium. The symposium is part of a partnership between the college and the Trust for Trauma Journalism.
The goals for the event are straightforward. We want to help journalists tell the stories of people who have experienced great trauma in ways that are sensitive to their pain. And we want journalists to take care of themselves as they encounter trauma as a part of doing their jobs.
That’s not easy.
This work takes journalists into dark places. To tell the tale of a school shooting, a natural disaster, a war or some other horror, a reporter must try to empathize with the feelings of those who have experienced that horror. That means not just witnessing but taking in their fear, their grief, their sense of desolation.
As we start the symposium, Dr. Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist who is a pioneer of both trauma journalism and the study of trauma itself, warns those attending that the discussions to come could trigger painful memories.
He’s right.
As the two days of discussions proceed, I find my thoughts dragged back to my newspaper days—particularly one period nearly 30 years ago.
It was a time when guns and drugs formed a dreadful partnership in cities across the country. Drive-by shootings became a common occurrence.
My editors discovered that victims, their families, their friends and other survivors would talk with me. Again and again, I was sent to a funeral or to the home of grieving parents.
At one, I talked with a father whose teenage son had been gunned down. The boy wasn’t even the intended target, just an innocent bystander who caught a stray bullet.
As the father talked with me about his son, his face twisted in grief as he struggled to fight back tears. He failed. The sobs rolled over him like a wave. He fell forward and I caught him, then held him as his weeping wracked his entire body.
Difficult as that moment was, it wasn’t the one that hit the hardest.
That one, in theory, should have been a happier story. It didn’t involve a death. I went to the hospital to talk with a little boy who had been clipped in another drive-by.
His mother and grandmother were with him. He was a third-grader, small for his age. He looked lost in the hospital bed.
When I asked how he was doing, he stared at me.
“I got shot,” he said. “Somebody shot me.”
Behind me, I could hear his mother and grandmother try to stifle sobs.
When I left the hospital, I sat outside for a long time, wondering what kind of world we lived in, thinking of that small boy and the memories he would carry throughout his life.
I got shot. Somebody shot me.
After I turned my story in, I asked my editors to not send me out to cover any more shootings for a time.
They agreed.
For a time.
Now, at the symposium, I listen to a former student of mine. She’s the news editor at the local paper. She talks about what she saw, what she experienced, while covering a mass shooting just up the road.
And I wonder how long those ghosts will follow her.
That’s the thing about this work.
The ghosts linger.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College. Send comments to [email protected].
