Reporters take heat in Canada, States for reaching out to donors who supported protests
Journalists in Canada and the
United States, veterans of a daily grind that entails tracking down and chatting up newsmakers, politicians and ordinary citizens by whatever means necessary, are encountering a very different - and hostile - world as they work to learn more about supporters of the protests in Ottawa.
Reporters are being harassed, spammed, “doxxed” and even threatened for reaching out to donors to an online crowdfunding campaign that was targeted last week by hackers who disclosed the contact details of thousands of pro-trucker contributors.
“I actually had someone come to my door and leave a threatening note,” said Bryan Schott, a political reporter with the Salt Lake Tribune who used the list to send emails to donors with Utah zip codes.
In Schott’s case, along with countless others, people have been using social media to post screen shots of emails they’ve received from reporters - usually innocuous queries asking for confirmation that they had donated to the protesters and whether they’d agree to an interview.
“I’ve been getting phone calls from pretty much all across the globe. I’ve been getting death threats, text messages with death threats, Facebook messages with death threats, Twitter (messages) with death threats,” he said.
The bulk of those calls have come from the U.S. and Canada, he added, with a handful coming from further afield, including Australia and the United Kingdom.
Since the publication of the first phone book, it’s been standard operating procedure for reporters to use publicly available information to reach out to ordinary citizens in an effort to glean facts, confirm or debunk details, or often simply to inject a grassroots perspective into their work.
The Canadian Press was among countless media outlets in both countries that reported on the leaked data, contacted people on the list and published the names of those who agreed to confirm on the record that they had made donations.
In the internet age, however, even the most basic newsgathering steps seem to carry a measure of peril.
“Anonymity emboldens a lot of people to do things — and that’s been true since the dawn of the internet,” Schott said. “It’s becoming a profession that is not for the faint of heart, and I suspect it’s going to get worse.”
Even reporters who cover incidents of harassment — or merely tweet links to such stories — have become targets themselves in the superheated online atmosphere surrounding the protests, which have been ongoing in Ottawa for nearly a month.
The Ottawa Citizen published a seemingly straightforward story Tuesday about a local business owner whose employees were harassed and storefronts vandalized after the leaked data showed she had made a $250 contribution to the protrucker cause.
But when one of the Citizen’s reporters tweeted a link to the piece, it caught the eye of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota congresswoman and one of the most fiery progressive Democrats on Capitol Hill.