Journalists see a danger
Some fear that a growing animosity puts them on the front lines.
A shooting that killed five people June 28 at the Capital Gazette was the latest in a string of gun attacks that have captured the nation’s attention.
This time, the targets were different: not schoolchildren or moviegoers, but journalists.
The assault killed more journalists than any attack in the USA since 9/11, which killed one freelance photographer and six broadcast engineers, and it underscores a growing fear that journalism is getting more dangerous.
While international reporting in conflict zones or authoritarian countries has always been risky, journalist deaths in the United States have been uncommon. But the Capital Gazette shooting catapulted the U.S. to the spot of thirdmost dangerous country for journalists, behind only Syria and Afghanistan, according to the non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists.
That rise has coincided with an increase in public attacks on the news media, many stemming from President Donald Trump, who has called the media the “enemy of the people.” Trump frequently vilifies media outlets such as The New York Times and CNN and has tweeted insults at individual reporters.
According to a report in April published by Reporters Without Borders, a global watchdog group defending free expression: “Democratically elected leaders no longer see the media as part of democracy’s essential underpinning, but as an adversary to which they openly display their aversion. ... A mediabashing enthusiast, Trump has referred to reporters as ‘ enemies of the people,’ the term once used by Joseph Stalin.”
In the case of the Capital Gazette, the shooter had a longstanding feud with the newspaper that predated the Trump administration. Courtney Radsch, the advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, warned against associating the two. “We have to be careful about linking this (the shooting) to the environment and the broader shift in dangerous rhetoric coming from high political office,” she said.
But for some, the shooting was a tragic manifestation of growing vitriol toward journalists and a warning sign that it could be getting worse.
“We will never know whether, if our nation’s public discourse had not gotten so poisonous, this man would have felt that he could just act with impunity,” said Lucy Dalglish, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland, where Capital Gazette victim Rob Hiaasen had been a lecturer. “But I can’t help but think that the nastiness form the top hasn’t helped.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 11 journalists – including the five shot last week – have been killed on the job since the committee began charting deaths via a database in 1992.
Among them: Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the tabloid newspaper The Sun, who died of inhalation anthrax in
2001, the same strain that had been mailed to other journalists, and Chauncey Bailey, editor in chief of the Oakland Post who was shot in 2007 for coverage of the financial ties of a local bakery known for community activism.
More recently, local TV station
WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were killed during a live broadcast in Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, in 2015. The attacker had been dismissed from his job at the station two years earlier.
The Capital Gazette shooting highlights another worrying trend, experts say: Despite Trump’s attacks on national news outlets, local media outlets are the ones particularly at risk.
“It is those journalists who are covering their community, who may be known by people in the community, who are therefore on the front lines,” Radsch said.
In the wake of the shooting, newsrooms across the country have increased their security.
If the Capital Gazette shooting is a harbinger of an era where local media organizations face serious threats as well as financial strife, the consequences could be dire, Dalglish said.
“If they can’t do their job informing their community, then you’re not going to know why your taxes are going up, you’re not going to know about the local high school football team, you’re not going to know who is running in the local elections,” she said. “They’re sort of like your first responders who do it because they feel it’s important, because they love it.”