After the Capital Gazette shooting in Maryland and amid President Donald Trump’s ever-increasing references to the press as “the enemy of the people,” newsrooms are bulking up on security measures and reporters are actively discussing the daily threats they face.
According to a Thursday Politico report, an end of the summer packed with government-directed rage at the Fourth Estate has journalists speaking out.
“What you do not see are the nasty letters or packages or emails. The threats of physical violence,” said MSNBC’s Katy Tur. “’I hope you get raped and killed,’ one person wrote to me just this week. ‘Raped and killed.’ Not just me, but a couple of my female colleagues as well.”
Though many outlets were hesitant to issue expansive statements, for fear of undermining their security measures, they did point to the increasingly hostile environment.
New York Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told Politico that “we have expanded measures to protect our journalists against the overall backdrop of increased threats and verbal attacks.”
“The volume of concerning threats has risen over the past couple of years, and we have been taking the necessary actions to make sure our staff is safe — that includes reviewing our protocols and coordinating with local authorities, as necessary,” added Washington Post spokesperson Gregg Fernandes.
A Fox News spokesperson declined to give Politico a quote, but said that the issue is receiving “increased attention.”
Though Trump has long positioned himself as hostile to most of his own country’s news outlets, the topic has been particularly discussed recently as, per Politico, Trump has referred to reporters as “the enemy of the people” five times in the past month alone.
White House aides have been pressed on the subject, with counselor Kellyanne Conway distancing herself from Trump’s refrain, while press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders hewed to the President’s stance, despite pressure.
Sadly, this is what America under Trump has come to. He has fomented hostility, anger and violence against the press, one of the first steps toward fascism. Turning the Press into the enemy has been an initial step throughout history toward authoritarianism.
What I want to know is, who is going to stand up and say, ‘enough’? These cult followers are all open-carry, NRA gun-nuts and they are holding our fourth estate hostage - do as Trump says, say nothing bad about him, or we will kill you and not suffer any consequences because Dear Leader has said it’s ok.
This is a dark period in our history. Very dark. It needs to have a bright light shone on it and be brought to a halt.
Words fail.
This just doesn’t happen in liberal democracies.
And yet -
The press corps STILL attends the daily briefing of lies and insults at the WH. They STILL report on the regime’s absurdities (some of them deadly) as if there’s some kind of method to their madness. They STILL refuse to sound alarm bells that the republic is under attack from within. (That would just be overblown, yannow?) Things were okay and kinda fun when the point was to savage SoS Clinton and make her a one term POTUS. To them, she was annoying and deserved to be held to the fire. Hunting season on a Clinton never stopped. Now the hunting season is on reporters who fomented that insanity. I don’t even have a tiny violin for this.
Sure is a good thing there are no right wing domestic terrorists.