Editor: “They were doing their bit for local journalism. Day in, day out. Night in, night out. They’re just doing their job,” said reporter Pat Furguson of the Capital Gazette, Annapolis, Maryland, following the attack and killing of five employees on June 28.
This should be chilling.
It used to be you could walk into most newspapers and broadcast outlets and head to the different departments, as I did as a student in Seattle.
Not anymore.
Today, most Canadian and American newspapers screen visitors and have them wait in the lobby.
Last Thursday, employees of newspapers large and small found out they may be attacked or killed by crazed people bent on violence. Copycats are the next loaded gun.
Angry letters to the editor used to be the most vitriolic response from a reader or subscriber. The 2015 attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris followed by the killing of a reporter and photojournalist in Roanoke, Virginia changed that. The attack in Annapolis only reinforced it.
President Donald Trump is the only leader (besides despots) who enjoys attacking the press as “fake news” and even calling out individual journalists by name.
Before last week’s tragedy, I was surprised domestic U.S. journalists could ever be hurt or killed; today I am not so sure with red hot anti-press rhetoric spewed by this president.
The overheated rhetoric from all sorts of people, from the right and the left (even in Canada as I’ve learned this past week), shows how people don’t know how to have polite conversation.
I suppose the shooting at the Capital Gazette (founded in 1772, four years before the Declaration of Independence was penned) hits closer to home for me.
As a longtime journalist, I was the reporter, then editor, of the weekly Gem State Miner, in Oldtown, Idaho, in the late 1980s.
After being hired, the publisher told me privately that I should “be careful” as a reporter in this largely rural area of small cities and communities of northern Idaho.
He cited the ultra-right Posse Comitatus, an antigovernment group in Idaho. The name comes from an 1878 law limiting the powers of the U.S. government using federal military to enforce domestic policies.
He didn’t need to tell me about the Aryan Nation, an anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi, white supremacist religious organization originally based in Hayden Lake, Idaho.
Locally on buses and the SkyTrain, people are edgier, mouthier, and confrontational, including attacks and the rare murder.
Some escalate after being called out after doing something wrong especially when no transit security are around.
Anger and violence should never be endured on mass transit or at work. Like killings at a newspaper.
Scott Larsen, New Westminster
