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Journalism, when done right, can inform people and help bring them together as a community. The small staff at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, did just that.
“The Capital has been my paper for my whole life,” India Ochs, a longtime Annapolis resident, posted on my Facebook page. “It’s why I always remained loyal to journalists and the written press. It published my first letter to the editor at age 5, and almost 40 years later, Rachael Pacella, who was injured but survived, had just reached out to me to comment last month on the county school budget.”
The shocking murders of four journalists and a sales representative on June 28 at the Capital Gazette offices hit home in Annapolis and around the country. Underscoring the respect the paper held within its community, the next day, inside the legendary baseball stadium Camden Yards, the Baltimore Orioles held a moment of silence, as the scoreboard showed the five faces of the murdered journalists.
The Capital Gazette attack is the worst massacre ever involving American journalists. It makes our country the third most dangerous nation for journalists in 2018.
President Donald Trump chose a different response. He initially declined a request from Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley to lower American flags in honor of the five fatalities at the Capital Gazette, although the White House later reversed course when this decision came under fire. The President has promptly ordered the lowering of flags in response to other mass shootings, including those at schools in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas.
The Capital Gazette attack is the worst massacre ever involving American journalists, both within or outside the United States. It makes our country the third most dangerous nation for journalists in 2018 after Afghanistan and Syria, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, where I used to work and remain an advisor. The Annapolis slaying comes during an unabated spate of mass shootings in the United States, accompanied by a rising tide of verbal attacks on the media from public figures including Trump.
I run a firm, Global Journalist Security, that advises international journalists and humanitarian professionals on how to protect themselves against such attacks. Protective measures for small newsrooms might include bullet-resistant steel doors, surveillance cameras at various entry points as well as in parking and exit areas. Establishing building access policies especially if the newsroom is sharing space with other tenants. And to run emergency response drills involving active shooter scenarios along with police alert and response.
Situational awareness training is another step to help individual journalists and other staffers learn subtle but valuable avoidance skills. It is worth noting, too, that in a few other nations from Peru to the Philippines, where journalists have faced repeated threats or attacks, a handful have chosen to either learn self-defense or legally arm themselves, or both.
But I have also learned that security begins with solidarity. Even the best of protective measures will likely fall short, if either public opinion or governing institutions of a country are working against them.
Since 1976, twenty-three journalists in the United States have been killed on the job. The first on this list was the investigative journalist Don Bolles, killed by a car bomb in 1976 in Phoenix. His murder led colleagues to investigate the city’s organized crime and to establish the nonprofit advocacy group Investigative Reporters and Editors.
A journalist is murdered about once every eleven days.
Ten more journalists who were also immigrants—reporting in their first language of Vietnamese, French, Chinese, or Spanish—were murdered in the ensuing decades. In 2007, another murdered journalist, Chauncey Bailey, an African-American reporter, was slain by a gunman near Bailey’s offices in Oakland.
A two-person TV crew, reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward, were both shot dead by a disgruntled employee in 2015 in Virginia. Two days later, I teared up inside the Nationals Park stadium when the Washington Nationals showed the faces of the slain journalists above the scoreboard. Earlier this year, the music journalist “Zach TV” Stoner, who covered community life and Hip Hop artists, was shot dead in Chicago.
Journalists elsewhere face more risk. On average, a journalist is murdered about once every eleven days. In most cases, the murderers enjoy blanket impunity. Murders in conflict zones, where governing institutions are weak, take the largest toll, but other relatively democratic nations like Mexico, Brazil, India, and the Philippines are not far behind. Russia is the most advanced nation where journalists have also been murdered with impunity, a fact that could easily go unnoticed as one watches its team advance in the World Cup.
In the United States, of course, easy legal access to firearms is an undeniable factor in the killings of journalists and others. The shooter in the Annapolis attack—like in 80 percent of other mass shootings—legally obtained his pump-action shotgun.
Then there is the copycat factor. Perpetrators of mass shootings in the United States, including the 2012 shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, referenced other mass shooters and incidents as inspirations. Hundreds of other disturbed individuals have similarly indicated that their respective attacks were somehow inspired by similar actions of others.
This is even more disturbing when one considers that, while many mass shooters are ruthless sociopaths, most do not fit any clinical definition of being mentally ill. The shooter in the Annapolis Capital Gazette massacre seemed to have been motivated, based on the available evidence so far, almost entirely by personal animus.
There is a connection in the attitudes of this unhinged gunman and the president of the United States: a dangerous failure to understand the role of the media in our society.
We cannot discount, either, as The Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan noted, the current negative climate surrounding the press. “[T]here is a connection,” she wrote, “in the attitudes of this unhinged gunman and the president of the United States: a dangerous failure to understand the role of the media in our society.”
In other nations where journalists are murdered, a climate of hostility is almost invariably a factor. In this nation, polls show the American public has grown increasingly distrustful of many institutions and established groups including the press. But only in recent years have public figures incited violence against the press.
President Trump’s ongoing verbal attacks against the press may well be a strategy, as CBS News “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl revealed at an awards dinner in May, to discredit journalists so that negative stories about him will not be believed. Here’s what she says Trump told her when she asked him why he demeaned the press, “He said, ‘You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.’”
Other public figures have made more aggressive attacks. The National Rifle Association spokeswoman Dana Loesch in an NRATV video earlier this year lashed out against The New York Times, The Washington Post, and MSNBC, including attacking some of the latter’s individual journalists by name. Previously, in a 2016 interview before she became an official NRA spokeswoman, Loesch spoke in even stronger terms.
“I’m happy frankly to see them curb-stomped,” Loesch said, referring to “these people” of “the mainstream media,” going on to call journalists “the rat bastards of the earth” and “the boil on the backside of American politics.”
“To place someone's mouth on a cement curb, and then stomp on their head from behind break out their teeth,” is how the urban dictionary defines “curb stomp.”
After the Annapolis newspaper shooting, Shaun King, a journalist and columnist for The Intercept, circulated the interview which NRATV titled “calling out the media.” In response, Loesch tweeted she was not referring to journalists themselves but “the stories” they publish, adding that she does not “encourage or excuse violence.”
There is no doubt journalists in this nation face more animosity now than before, and that menacing remarks by Trump and allied public figures are contributing to the enmity. Honoring murdered journalists at major league baseball games is a step in the other direction. But the climate of animosity seems to continue to spread.
One can only hope that the Annapolis Capital Gazette attack will remain an isolated case, rather than become a harbinger of the future.