The nightmare of every journalist ever threatened for simply doing their job came true last week.
While we are still grieving for our community newspaper peers at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland — slaughtered inside their newsroom by a man who had a longstanding grudge against reporters and editors — we can’t say we were surprised to hear about this horrible act of violence against journalists.
Ask any veteran news reporter and they’ll likely tell you the same thing: journalists have always had to deal with vague threats from irate readers, but the mood is different lately. It’s darker, more immediate.
Twenty years ago, a reader may have sued or left a nasty voicemail or, in the most extreme cases, slashed our car tires in the newspaper parking lot.
Now, however, their ire has the backing and support of the President of the United States, who days before the Gazette murders whipped his supporters into a frenzy at a rally before pointing to media covering the event and calling them out as “the enemy of the people.”