Perils of telling the truth
So now we add journalists to the growing list of victims of mass killings in the United States, a mournful tally that includes police officers, schoolchildren, church attendees, concertgoers and night club revelers.
The vicious assault Thursday at the office of the Capital Gazette, the daily newspaper based in Annapolis, Md., took the lives of five of its employees and injured two others when a man used his shotgun to blast through the glass doors to the newsroom and unleash an assault. Police described it as a targeted shooting.
Not all mass shootings are the same. Unlike the attack that left 58 dead and 851 hurt in Las Vegas last October, or the 2016 Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando that killed 49, or the murder in 2012 of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, no part of this can be blamed on the availability of semiautomatic assault weapons.
Rather, police suspect the attack stems from the man’s past conflicts with the newspaper for its coverage of his guilty plea to criminal harassment using social media. The shooter had sued the newspaper for defamation, a case that was dismissed by a judge. That is, the suspect was angry because the newspaper had followed the first tenet of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics: “Seek truth and report it.”
That’s what the people working at the Capital Gazette were doing, covering important local news — government meetings, school events, sports teams in Maryland’s Anne Arundel County. It’s much the same as the Times Union’s reporting every day in our Capital Region.
Here and across the U.S., journalists rarely face physical danger doing their work. That’s not the case in all countries. The Committee to Protect Journalists says 75 journalists were killed in the line of duty last year — 38 murdered, the rest killed by crossfire or while covering other dangerous assignments.
Over the years, Times Union journalists have sometimes faced physical threats. Some have been detained while covering news events; one was beaten after writing an unflattering restaurant review. But for the most part, readers appropriately exercise their Constitutional right of free speech to criticize or praise the newspaper’s coverage.
Sadly, such civility is rapidly being eroded. It didn’t begin with the poisonous anti-media rhetoric of Donald Trump, but the First Amendment is eroded when the president of the United States repeatedly and falsely labels true stories that he doesn’t like as “fake news,” and when he vilifies competent professional journalists as “enemies of the people.” Some extremists have gone further, endorsing violence against reporters, echoing the inflammatory rhetoric heard previously only in countries run by murderous dictators.
The Capital Gazette employees killed were two editors, Gerald Fischman and Rob Hiaasen; a local sports reporter, John Mcnamara; a sales assistant, Rebecca Smith and Wendi Winters, a writer in the specialty publications unit.
To the staff of the Capital Gazette and the loved ones of the deceased, we at the Times Union offer our sorrow, and promise to stand with you.