Journalism in an Atmosphere of Hate
Capital-Gazette shooting appears the work of a feud, but happens in broader context of anti-press attacks by Trump, the Right.
Capital-Gazette shooting appears the work of a feud, but happens in broader context of anti-press attacks by Trump, the Right.
Journalism is a sacred profession. The word “vocation,” the way Catholic priests use it, comes to mind. We are called to the job, and we know ourselves to be defenders of he democratic spirit, providers of information and the givers of voice to the powerless.
We are still sorting out the facts of what happened yesterday and why the shooter acted as he did, why he targeted The Capital Gazette. This, however, is what we do know (according to the AP): The staff put out today’s paper. Despite losing their comrades, they made sure the newspaper came out, and that the shooting was covered from a local angle.
We also know this, from the same AP story:
Those killed included Rob Hiaasen, 59, the paper’s assistant managing editor and brother of novelist Carl Hiaasen. Also slain were editorial page editor Gerald Fischman, special projects editor Wendi Winters, reporter John McNamara and sales assistant Rebecca Smith.
I mention their names now, early in this essay, because this is about them. Five people, working to put out a newspaper, to provide he information necessary for the people of the Annapolis community to participate in their government, are dead. I list their names to make it clear that they are not anonymous. They are not the TV personalities who pose as journalists, but the men and women in the trenches, like the kids I’ve trained and men and women I’ve worked with as an editor and writer.
We know something else, too. Journalists are disliked and distrusted. Gallup has tracked trust in newspapers as an institution for 45 years, and the numbers are discouraging, just one in four people today have a great deal or a lot of trust in newspapers, while nearly two in five have little or no trust. Just 10 years ago he numbers were even, and 20 years ago the numbers were reversed. The numbers are similar — if a tad worse for TV news.
Anecdotally, I’ve experienced this — I’ve lost count of the number of people who tell me that every journalist has an agenda, that we make things up, or tell only part of the story.
This view of the institution has not grown in a bubble. There has been a decades-long assault on the integrity of he press, coming mostly from the right, an assault that finds is apotheosis in the growth of partisan news outlets like Fox and Breitbart posing as legitimate and balanced news agencies. The Internet, which has provided opportunities for journalism (democratization of access and production, an ability to move more quickly, to encourage actual, real-time conversation), has also exacerbated the partisan divide, allowing users to seek out only hose sources hat confirm their preconceived world view.
This distrust, however, has reached new heights, and critics are using increasingly violent language in their attacks. Milo Yiannopolous, the right-wing troll, “recently told two reporters that he “can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists.” He’s since said it was a joke — after the Capital Gazette shooting — but hyperbole like this has grown more common on the right.
Ted Nugent, a has-been rocker and right-wing provocateur, describes the press — along with liberals, academics, Hollywood, and even Republican moderates — as “rabid coyotes running around.”
“You don’t wait till you see one to go get your gun, keep your gun handy,” said Nugent, who campaigned for Trump in 2016. “And every time you see one, shoot one.”
This hyperbole is not new. Even the aggression is not new, but it is bleeding into the mainstream in dangerous ways, with even the president using the language and imagery of violence to denigrate the press. See his anti-CNN video tweet; his blaming the press for aiding smugglers, which transformed the media into a criminal element; and his repeated description of the media as fake and an “enemy of the state,” which takes the enemy claim a step farther than Nixon’s “the press is the enemy” line.
I don’t raise these issues because I want to blame Trump for what happened in Annapolis yesterday. Trump is not to blame — it appears that the shooting was the culmination of a personal beef that grew increasingly unhinged — but there is no doubt that he is exacerbating the tensions and making it harder for journalists to work. He’s poisoning an already unhealthy atmosphere, and that can only make things harder for my colleagues.
Everyone wants to rush now to proclaim their allegiance to the news media, as they did after the terrorist attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris. And, as with that sudden show of sympathy and support, it is a shallow allegiance. I’m sure our critics will be back to their hyperbole, to calling for journalists to be “curb stomped, as Dana Loesch of the NRA said in 2016, and we’ll continue doing the thankless work that keeps democracy functioning.