On this Fourth of July, the best birthday gift America can give itself is to celebrate the First Amendment and protect the journalists who keep its people informed.

The tragic events last week at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, where five of the paper’s staff members were murdered in their own newsroom, sent shockwaves through the country and, particularly, through news organizations big and small, national and local.

Mourning the loss of those five colleagues and reading of the esteem in which they were regarded seemed to hold up a mirror to countless newsrooms – it was as if everyone who had ever worked on a local paper knew someone exactly like Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith or Wendi Winters.

As the search for answers intensified in the days following the attack, stories recounted the killer’s “bitter history” with the newspaper and his frequent veiled threats. Still the fact remains that for several years, and with what the paper’s retired publisher described as “escalating social media attacks against the newspaper and its journalists”, the shooter took no action. We may never know what it was about this day that, sadly, proved to be different.

What we do know, and honour, is the sheer determination of the survivors of the attack, still in shock, to do their jobs under simply unimaginable circumstances and bring out a newspaper the following day. And we saw also in the aftermath the compassion, consideration and support that flowed from the journalism community – as well as from the countless local communities of which papers like this are an integral and vital part.

A recent study showed the correlation between the loss of a local newspaper and less efficient government, while just this week the Governor of New Jersey acknowledged that states have a role in supporting local media to encourage local democracy, when he authorized financial support for the Civic Information Consortium, a “nonprofit with a mission to revive, strengthen and transform local media.”

But the importance of a local paper, regardless of how it might have changed through the years, goes further than that; to the very heart and soul of small towns and rural communities.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells reflected in the New Yorker on the true value of local newspapers, saying: “The decline of local newspapers is often lamented — and even more so this morning — but lamented in a particular way, as if their main role has been as municipal watchdogs, and, without them, corruption and the simple aggression of the powerful will now go unchecked.

“Having worked as a local reporter, I tend to think that the role of these publications was broader than that, and the loss is far deeper. We were an outlet through which ordinary people could explain themselves to strangers, without requiring the political side-taking of talk radio or the tribal insularity of the Internet.”

Another thing the attack did, as the Poynter Institute reminded us, was show how dangerous the work of journalism can be, “performed in service to a greater good.”

Charged rhetoric

It also, inevitably, threw the spotlight on the current environment of heightened antipathy against the press, particularly in an atmosphere where charged rhetoric may appear to have little real-world consequence to the speaker, but can easily reinforce a sense of – to a willing listener – somehow justifiable conflict.

Not that this, sadly, is anything new. A report last year looked at the targeting of journalists at protests or rallies and the Columbia Journalism Review connected it to President Trump and the outgrowth of his 2016 campaign: “With his near-daily denouncements of the press,” the CJR said, “the president has helped normalize abuses against journalists by ordinary people. Public trust in the press is low, and a growing number of Americans see journalists as part of an elite coastal establishment that doesn’t understand them or share their interests.”

Kathleen Parker argues further in the Washington Post that the president has encouraged a “verbal open season” on journalists. The symbolism of Trump’s response to the Annapolis tragedy, therefore, was always going to take on an added importance.

The walk from the helicopter after it landed at the White House showed him avoiding shouted questions about the shooting. Then, the Mayor of Annapolis said Trump had declined a request to lower flags as a mark of respect. The White House subsequently reversed the decision, issuing a proclamation honouring the victims; but the President shows little sign of being constrained in his Twitter offensive against the “fake news” media – a strategy to undermine the legitimacy of the entire industry that is, in essence, so simple, he didn’t even mind explaining it to Lesley Stahl recently.

On Independence Day last year, the story was about Donald Trump’s baiting of CNN with a doctored wrestling video. This year, in the online bubble that passes for our contemporary political discourse, the conversation ranges from an ironically heated discussion about the role of “civility” to nonsensical warnings of a “second civil war”.

In such an atmosphere, it’s often difficult to focus on the bigger picture and the changes that have happened in the relationship between press and people.

After the shooting, Miles Howard wrote at WBUR about life as a journalist under Trump, saying that “Trump’s central charge – that the mainstream media produces fake news to defame “real Americans” like him and his followers – was the equivalent of pouring a can of lighter fluid on a fire that had been smouldering for several years already,” and that “What Trump did was embolden people who already held a grudge against the media to be more openly contemptuous.”

The Baltimore Sun – the Capital Gazette’s parent paper – said in its Saturday editorial: “It is facile to blame President Trump’s rhetoric for an act of violence like this one but equally naive to believe the coarsening of our discourse doesn’t feed it. If we can so easily disconnect from the reality that five people are dead — five people with families and friends whose lives are shattered — what more horrors must we endure?”

And the former Capital Gazette publisher quoted earlier, Tom Marquardt, wrote in the Washington Post that the best way to honour those we lost was to “respect their profession.”

He writes: “President Trump isn’t responsible for the Annapolis tragedy any more than the Second Amendment is. But he and his supporters seem to have forgotten that the Constitution that gives them the right to bear arms is the same document that safeguards the right to free speech. You cannot honor one amendment without honoring the other 26. Those dedicated Capital Gazette journalists, like others before them and surely others after them, fought for free speech at all costs, including death. It’s not prayers their survivors and co-workers need; it’s respect for what reporters and editors do every day.”

Change?

Joy Mayer of the Trusting News Project wrote recently that a “more nuanced understanding” of journalism was needed, and that would require the help of communities, while Indira Lakshmanan argued that it was incumbent on the press to “better explain what we do” in order to counteract hatred. Or even, as Lewis Wallace argues in the Columbia Journalism Review, that we need to change the journalistic process to help build trust.

But we also have to be pragmatic and accept that there will likely now always be people who will hate the news media for their own reasons, regardless of how the media might change, or anything politicians or others may say publicly.

One of the most remarkable interviews with Capital Gazette survivors came on Brian Stelter’s CNN media show Reliable Sources, when he spoke with Rachael Pacella and Phil Davis, as well as photographer Joshua McKerrow.

“We did what any newsroom would have done,” McKerrow told Stelter about how the paper reacted, before adding: “I want to re-dedicate the rest of my career to helping create more empathy and more communication.” If these reporters’ commitment to their profession is as strong as ever – stronger, even – so should ours be as citizens to ensure their right to practice it without fear.

But the simple, sad, inescapable reality is that five families will never be able to think of this holiday without missing loved ones.

And while we remember that people working every day to inform us and keep us connected are just that, people; in terms of the relationship between the press and the public they serve, the last word should go to one of their colleagues, Capital Gazette reporter Pat Furgurson, who addressed mourners gathered for a candelight vigil on Friday.

“We are not the enemy,” he said. “We’re you.”

 

You can subscribe to the Capital Gazette’s digital edition here, or contribute to Madi Alexander’s Crowdfunder appeal to help the victims’ families here.


Also published on Medium.