It’s kind of hard to know where to start.
This is personal — on many levels.
Nearly every journalist I know began their career at a newspaper like the Capital Gazette. For me it was a small community newspaper in Peekskill, New York, right next to the town I grew up in.
This was in the time before the Web and I was hired to cover high school sports — banging out stories on old typewriters, barely getting paid a living wage — and loving every minute of it.
“The media” is a misleading phrase and in my News Literacy class every semester, we start off by pulling apart what it means when people say “the media.” The bottom line is that “the media” is such a general phrase it almost means nothing — since it includes everything, including the great community newspapers that are the backbones of towns and cities throughout this country.
The editors and reporters who make these newspapers tick are people living their lives by trying to provide information to their communities — they are hardly the “enemy of the people.”
And reporters and editors receive threats at these places. I received my share of threats over the years (many from public officials who weren’t happy with me.) But, there were a handful of times where I became worried, including once when I was interviewing the leader of a major gang in New England who wasn’t happy about my line of questioning and paused and slowly asked me what my last name was. I still get chills thinking about it.
But that’s nothing compared to what friends, colleagues and my own journalism students — especially women — face today, thanks to social media. It’s becoming an increasingly dangerous profession (it has been in many hot spots outside the United States for years.)
But good reporters and editors are needed today more than ever.
Unfortunately, many out there believe they can do the job of a journalist — even better. And that belief inevitably leads to ongoing criticism of “the media.” I’ve argued for a long time that regular folks (beyond Donald Trump) need to check themselves with their baseless critiques of journalists because it helps to create a dangerous environment for journalists.
It’s become clear that the shooter in Thursday’s newsroom shooting had a long-standing feud with Capital Gazette reporters and editors so it’s hard to gauge whether the current anti-journalism environment contributed to his decision to shoot up a newsroom. But it sure didn’t help.
If you’ve never been in a newsroom, they are not fortresses. And it could have been worse. The amazingly quick response of the police saved lives.
I used a strange phrase on Twitter Thursday: “after every mass shooting.” A friend pointed out how devastating that phrase was — and is. And I always think back to Newtown, Connecticut, and those poor kids. People are being gunned down in schools, churches, universities and, now, newsrooms.
One of the Capital Gazette reporters who survived the shooting went on CNN last night. She was brutally honest, saying that people will move onto the next story within days while those who survived have lives that have been shattered.
Then she said this: “Thanks for your prayers, but I couldn’t give a f about them if there’s nothing else.”
So, where do we go from here? I feel like I say that after “every mass shooting.”
This one is personal.
We need journalists today more than ever. Stop the vitriol. Anytime anyone starts a sentence with “the media is biased because …” — stop them and ask them what they mean by “the media.”
As Petula Dvorak, a columnist for The Washington Post, writes:
“Reporters go into neighborhoods people are afraid of, armed with nothing but a notebook and pen. When a town evacuates, they’re the ones heading in, getting soaked and battered by the wind. And sometimes worse, like WYFF-TV reporter Michael McCormick and photojournalist Aaron Smeltzer, who died while chasing a storm in Greenville, S.C., last month.
“The reporters at the Gazette aren’t the authors of the fake news so many folks are confused by on their Facebook feeds.”
Steve Fox is a senior lecturer and sports journalism director for the Journalism Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has 25 years of experience as an editor and reporter for print and online publications.