Online abuse must be ended
Picture it.
You reach your desk, settle, turn on your computer, check the messages that have accumulated.
Even though it’s far from the first time, you gasp, wince, recoil from what you see there, and wonder at the pure unfiltered malice and hatred that causes a person — a stranger, or many of them — to do such things.
Another barrage of filth and profanity and threats of bodily harm — aimed at your gender, your body parts, your skin colour, your race or religion, aimed at your very identity.
All for being a journalist. For being a female journalist. For being a female journalist of colour.
Journalists on the receiving end of this have long since had enough and are fighting back — supported now by their colleagues, their employers and their industry.
It is a movement that’s heartening to see.
Brent Jolly, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, said last week that “being a journalist in Canada has become a hazardous occupation” and the perpetrators of hate must be held accountable.
And a statement from media organizations (including Torstar, which owns the Star) and professional associations added muscle to the plea.
“While criticism is an integral part of journalism and democracy, there can be no tolerance for hate and harassment of journalists targeted for doing their job,” they said. “Attacks that inordinately target women and racialized journalists.”
In a message to staff, Jordan Bitove, the Star’s publisher and co-owner, promised action to improve internal processes for protecting staff and identifying perpetrators of online abuse.
“We are 100 per cent united in fighting these despicable attacks,” he wrote.
“They will not be tolerated.”
Reporters — mostly women, and largely women of colour — have taken to posting some of the bile sent their way.
It is repulsive, full of words containing the hard consonants of profanity. Words intended to shock, wound, demean.
The men who send such stuff — and the content makes clear it is overwhelmingly men — are apparently oblivious to how small and shrunken it makes them seem.
They present as cauldrons of rage and fear. Fear that they are failures, that they cannot compete, that the world — and life — has passed them by.
The last half-century and more appears to have been a bafflement to them.
They have not come to terms with the arrival of women in the workforce and in positions of influence and power.
They can’t reconcile themselves to the movement of people around the world that has brought other cultures to a continent they regard as “theirs.”
They wish the world could have been frozen at a time when their demographic presided and prospered without challenge.
They fail to understand that history does not work that way. That no one gets to stop evolution at a moment most beneficial to them.
And so these men need scapegoats, someone to blame, someone on whom to vent their own feelings of impotence.
In the venting, it’s hard to imagine these men could possibly have mothers, sisters, wives, daughters, hard to imagine that they have friends, acquaintances, colleagues of different colour, background or faith than their own.
Modern journalism is hard work even under the best of circumstances. Technology has increased the pace and the number of platforms to serve. Economics has diminished the financial benefits and the number of people doing the work.
To add daily lashings of bile to the job — with its relentless workload and large responsibilities of monitoring power and ensuring an informed citizenry — is beyond obscene.
The campaign to fight back against abuse that no man or woman should have to bear is not the end. But it is a necessary and laudable beginning.
Journalists have had enough abuse and are fighting back