Driving down the Peninsula recently on the way home from a business meeting in San Francisco, I was surfing the radio dial when I dropped in on Gil Gross’ afternoon show on KGO. He was talking with Ravi Peruman. Longtime KGO listeners – and those in Bay Area news media – know Ravi better as veteran reporter R.J. Peruman.
I was a bit confused at first because Peruman clearly wasn’t doing a news segment. It turned out he had been off work for two months while undergoing hospitalization and treatment for severe depression. At his low point, Peruman contemplated suicide. Now he was talking openly on his own station for the first time about his pain, his ordeal and his recovery.
The underlying cause of his despondency? A career of covering violent, gruesome news. The tipping point, Peruman said, was the suicide of a teenager who jumped to his death inside the atrium of the Hyatt Embarcadero earlier this year. Arriving at the scene, Ravi caught a glimpse of the kid’s face before it could be covered. It jolted Ravi and conjured the image of his own son. In Ravi’s mind at that moment, all the years of human tragedy he had reported on so dispassionately, so “objectively,” came hurtling down into a crumpled heap on the lobby floor of his psyche.
There is more, of course, to Ravi’s story and his struggles with traumatic stress. But the cumulative effect of the day-to-day exposure to the ugliest sides of life and death is powerful.
I get this. Even though I left reporting years ago, I understand the lasting power of the images, voices, sounds and smells of violent crime and accidental carnage. Thankfully, I never covered a war, a plane crash or an execution (although my father covered fifteen of them).
I did report on many of San Francisco’s most notorious crimes and tragic events. During my years with the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1970s, assignments took me to dark places. I worked the graveyard shift on the police beat, spent a week on round-the-clock call with homicide detectives, lived in the firehouse and fought fires with the men of Engine Co. 21, ducked behind cars at shootouts, sidestepped blood and bones at assassinations, assaults, accidents and autopsies.
During the interview on KGO, Peruman and Gross noted something about my former profession that caught me completely by surprise. They talked about journalists as “first responders” to crime scenes, fires, explosions, earthquakes, crashes and other emergencies much like cops, fire fighters, EMTs and other officials.
It had never occurred to me that reporters and photographers fall into the same category. They hear the police radio or fire dispatcher announce the call and they go. Even though they are at the scene with emergency workers, they are not actively doing anything to tend to the dead, assist the injured, douse the flames, protect bystanders. With microphones, cameras and notebooks, news people merely observe, ask questions and report. But they don’t feel.
In spite of finding ourselves in dangerous environments, reporters in my day simply didn’t get killed on the job. With rare exceptions, I don’t recall fearing for my safety. Well, sure, there were a few reckless photographers behind the wheel, tearing through the streets to a scene. Still, we wore an invisible aura of invulnerability, walking into crime scenes holding our flimsy press credentials aloft as if they were bulletproof vests.
Even when the Zodiac killer threatened my colleague Paul Avery in a Halloween card, Paul laughed it off and we repaired to Hanno’s in the alley behind the paper for drinks. That all changed for me in November of 1978.
A contingent of Bay Area media – including Chronicle reporter Ron Javers, San Francisco Examiner reporter Tim Reiterman and Examiner photographer Greg Robinson – accompanied Congressman Leo Ryan’s delegation on a fact-finding mission to the Rev. Jim Jones’ jungle compound in Guyana.
Everyone knows the outcome. Jones’ gunmen opened fire on Ryan’s group as they left Jonestown, killing Ryan, Robinson, NBC reporter Don Harris, his cameraman, Bob Brown, and a temple defector. Reiterman and Javers were among ten others wounded.
The shootings jarred the Chronicle and Examiner newsrooms. After hiding in the jungle overnight, Javers, who sat next to me at the paper, called in and dictated his first-person account of the attack. As he talked and I typed, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
The Journalists Memorial at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., pays tribute to 1,913 individuals around the world who have died reporting the news dating back to 1837. They include, oddly enough, the founder of the Chronicle, Charles de Young, who was shot to death in his office in April, 1880 at age 35 by the son of the mayor in a personal and political act of revenge. The only other Chronicle staffer to die on duty was editorial writer Vince Mahoney, who perished in a plane crash in Bombay, India, returning from a tour of Indonesia in 1949.
We had scarcely recovered from the Jonestown killings when another tragedy rocked the city just ten days later. On a bright Monday morning, Supervisor Dan White shot and killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk in their City Hall offices within earshot of scores of city workers, including then-Board of Supervisors president Dianne Feinstein. Reporters at the scene were in shock once more. Over the next five months, as I tracked the aftermath of the killings and sat in the front row at White’s trial, I became more aware of the extent to which a decade of this coverage was taking its toll on me emotionally.
Two years after that awful November, I left the business. But even now, nearly thirty years later, I perk up when I hear someone like Ravi Peruman confiding publicly what reporters rarely talk about outside our own homes, if at all.
In a recent LA Times column last week, James Rainey describes a new documentary on this subject, “Breaking News, Breaking Down.” The film explores how journalists today “dive headlong toward disaster, seldom imagining that they can be snared in the psychological trauma” of such events as 9/11, Katrina and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ravi Peruman has changed his first name from R.J. to help shed the personality that carried him into the depths of depression. He recently invited his peers to join a journalists’ trauma group he formed on Facebook to stimulate support and discussion while furthering his own recovery.
The group has 19 members already, including some prominent Bay Area reporters and anchors, and undoubtedly will grow.
I was proud to be among the first responders.
