Capital Gazette shooting highlights the dangers facing today's journalists

A shooting that killed five people at the Capital Gazette newspaper on June 28 was only the latest in a string of gun attacks that have captured the nation's attention.

This time, the shooting's targets were different: not schoolchildren or moviegoers, but journalists.

It was the deadliest assault on journalists in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks, which killed one freelance photographer and six broadcast engineers, and it underscores a growing fear that journalism is getting more dangerous.

While international reporting in conflict zones or authoritarian countries has always been risky, journalist deaths in the United States have, until now, been uncommon. But the Capital Gazette shooting catapulted the U.S. to the spot of third-most dangerous country for journalists, behind only Syria and Afghanistan, according to the non-profit Committee to Protect Journalists. 

That rise has coincided with an increase in public attacks on the press, many stemming from President Donald Trump, who has painted the media as the "enemy of the people." Trump frequently vilifies media outlets such as the New York Times and CNN and has tweeted insults at individual reporters, fueling a rise in wider animosity toward reporters.

According to an April report published by Reporters Without Borders, a global watchdog group defending free expression, "Democratically elected leaders no longer see the media as part of democracy’s essential underpinning, but as an adversary to which they openly display their aversion ... A media-bashing enthusiast, Trump has referred to reporters as 'enemies of the people,' the term once used by Joseph Stalin."

In the case of the Capital Gazette, the shooter had a longstanding feud with the paper that predated the Trump administration. Courtney Radsch, the advocacy director for the Committee to Protect Journalists, warned against conflating the two.

"We have to be careful about linking this (the shooting) to the environment and the broader shift in dangerous rhetoric coming from high political office," she said.

But for some, the shooting was a tragic manifestation of growing vitriol toward journalists and a warning sign that it could be getting worse.

"We will never know whether, if our nation’s public discourse had not gotten so poisonous, this man would have felt that he could just act with impunity," said Lucy Dalglish, dean of the journalism school at the University of Maryland, where Capital Gazette victim Rob Hiaasen had served as a lecturer. "But I can’t help but think that the nastiness form the top hasn’t helped."

Previous attacks on journalists, though less deadly, have also illustrated the fact that hatred of the media can morph into violence.

The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 11 journalists — including the five shot at the Capital Gazette — have been killed on the job since the committee begin charting deaths via a database in 1992.

Among them: Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the tabloid newspaper The Sun, who died of inhalation anthrax in 2001, the same strain of anthrax that had been mailed to other journalists. And Chauncey Bailey, editor in chief of the Oakland Post who was shot in retaliation for coverage of the financial ties of a local bakery known for community activism in 2007.

More recently, local TV station WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward were killed during a live broadcast in Smith Mountain Lake, Virginia, in 2015. The attacker had been dismissed from his job at the station two years earlier, in 2013, and had a history of conflict at work allegedly fueled by racial grievances.

Parker's father, Andy Parker, said he thought of his daughter immediately when he heard about the shooting in Annapolis.

"The memory of Alison’s murder just came flooding back," he said. "All the mass shootings are terrible, but this one hit me harder than any."

The Capital Gazette shooting highlights another worrying trend, experts say: Despite Trump's frequent attacks on national news outlets, local media organizations are the ones particularly at risk.

"It is those journalists who are covering their community, who may be known by people in the community, who are therefore on the front lines," Radsch said. She added that the vast majority of journalists killed since 1992 had worked for local news organizations.

"Small media outlets in smaller communities provide local news, pure and simple," Parker said. "The New York Times isn't going to cover this stuff, the Washington Post isn't going to cover this stuff."

In the wake of the shooting, newsrooms across the country have upped their security. 

If the Capital Gazette shooting is a harbinger of a new era where local media organizations face serious safety threats as well as debilitating financial strife, the consequences could be dire, Dalglish said.

"If they can’t do their job informing their community, then you’re not going to know why your taxes are going up, you’re not going to know about the local high school football team, you’re not going to know who is running in the local elections," she said. "They’re sort of like your first responders who do it because they feel it’s important, because they love it."

WSBTV