The truest thing I can tell you about news is something you may not have thought about. If you are of the opinion that news is largely about happy events and achievements of various kinds, you are very wrong. I may have mentioned this before, or maybe I just meant to mention it, but the daily news “grind” is largely a record of things gone wrong. That isn’t exclusively true but it is fact.

This next thought I have heard expressed in many ways over the years and it speaks to one of the real burdens of a life in journalism. Maybe it is biggest reality that is part of this business. You get to see all kinds of things in news. You get a front row seat at everything. There are great triumphs and stories of great achievement but there are also things that just haunt you. I won’t go into details, but I’ll tell you a story of one journalist in our employ about 20 years ago who came back from an accident and said to me: “I’m not going back there. You can fire me if you want but I’m not going back!” The accident in question was a double fatality. It was a car accident and drowning accident not far from St. John’s.

I told the reporter who was so obviously traumatized that he didn’t have to go back, and we would send someone else in his place to do the story. That is what we did. That reporter, who first had been at the scene of that accident, left the business shortly after that and worked eventually in public relations. It is presumed he lived happily ever. There are other instances like that, but I won’t go into them. It isn’t necessary. News is still a wonderfully rewarding career, but it is very hard on you.

I could write all night about this, but I will express it a single sentence as I continue this story. It is one of the ultimate truths in news and it is that “once you see something you can’t NOT see it.” Those things become part you and part of the baggage you carry around with you. You can’t really put that baggage down.

When I retired from the daily news business at NTV I thought I had been set free from at least picking up more baggage. I wasn’t. I watched CNN news the other night and sat transfixed as the latest report from Gaza. I still watch the news and see the terrible destruction in Gaza, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw in the news that night. There were starving people on my screen, and they were fighting. They were fighting over food. They were fighting over parcels that were meant to relieve their horrible plight. It was horrible. It was the face of starvation and anguish.

When we were younger picking sides in a war in the Middle East was easy. We stayed with Israel because they seemed more like us than anyone else. In the Six Days War we were all cheering on the Israelis and their general and Chief of Staff Moishe Dayan. In our minds the Israelis were good, and the Palestinians were bad. The Israelis were allies of the United States and at that time we thought everything American was okay. It was that easy. That was back in 1967. Things would change through the Vietnam War, and elsewhere.

In Gaza, I watch the screen and I am horrified. Yes, I know all the arguments about HAMAS and the horrors they have inflicted on Israel, but it doesn’t matter to me. None of the arguments that support Israel matter to me. The little children scrambling for food are not HAMAS. They are little children. They are like my grandchildren except they are hungry and are getting killed.

Israel will pay a terrible price for this. They are becoming isolated from decent nations. Canada, through our Prime Minister Marc Carney, has said Canada will recognize a Palestinian state. None of that matters either because the images I saw just won’ go away. There was one little boy about the age of my grandson scraping up a tiny pile of flour and holding it in his T-shirt. There were adults scrambling after scraps of food. How can a world watch this happen? Meanwhile, as I write this, Israel has announced it will simply take over a portion of the Gaza strip.

Again, they are images we see that will not go way. I can’t escape the images of what starvation does to people. My wife and I were watching CNN the other evening and in coverage of that horrible Gaza situation she said. “I just can’t watch this anymore.” Good for her.

The problem is like I mentioned in the beginning. Once you see something you can’t NOT see it. I bet the reporter who announced to me several decades ago that he wasn’t going back to an accident scene still carries the images from that day around in his head. Among a thousand other things I will carry the Gaza images.
You can’t not see it.

You can contact Jim Furlong at [email protected]