A Terrible Day for Our Country
It’s too easy and sophomoric to blame the press for yesterday’s shooting, but that’s where we are today in America.
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I remember when President Ronald Reagan was shot 43 years ago. I was very young, but I have a clear memory of watching TV reports of the president’s suited-up Secret Service agents bundling the president into a car. My dad told me that day that any moment in which a political figure is targeted with violence is a terrible day for America. But, among many lessons, there is one to observe as it pertains to the press.
Now, with the attempt on former President Trump’s life, I don’t care what side you’re on, we need to recognize that this is a terrible day for America.
When bullets whizzed by Trump yesterday, hitting him once, his supporters ducked to varying degrees behind him as they heard shots continue. Very soon on the bullets’ heels came — surprise, surprise — hate-filled accusations of blame being placed on the press.
“This is your fault!” Trump supporters at the rally shouted nearly immediately at members of the media, who were not only crouching for their lives, but filming and photographing and taking notes so that we would all be able to see and understand what happened in this historic moment.
Fox News and other conservative outlets have done great damage to our freedom of the press over the last 10 years. With Trump’s supporters shouting hate at any outlet that’s not Fox or similarly right-wing for all this time, I have wondered over and over: Do people truly want a single-source media — a state-run media? Do they even know what that means? As the former senior editor of the Committee to Protect Journalists, I know very well what it means. It means that journalists’ work meant for the public will be subject to government redlining, that there will be no independent reporting and therefore no room for truth in what we produce.
It’s a potential future few who protest our current media seem to grasp. I could spend all day talking about false accusations against journalists in China, Russia, Brazil, the Philippines and elsewhere who supposedly violated “national security” or spoke badly about a ruling leader, or who simply reported on civilian grievances or human rights abuses. Those reporters who are not murdered are sent to hard-labor prison camps or jail, and their families are censored and severely restricted in public life. See: Russia’s Dimitri Muratov, Turkey’s Can Dündar and Erdem Gül, and Ethiopia’s Belete Kassa, to name just a very few.
I don’t think American audiences understand how much we as the media deeply value the First Amendment and our role in society as recorders of the first draft of history — to the point of risking our lives to get the shot, to write down the moment.
American politicians have continued to pile the blame on the media since yesterday, as if this shooting were not the fault of a very disturbed man, but ours — the press. As if we somehow led this attempted killer by the hand until it was curled around an AR-15, firing at the president.
The supposed “gadflies” on the right bear blame in what’s happened. Before pointing to the supposed “left-wing” media, for instance, consider statements like this: “On a daily basis, MSNBC tells its audience that Trump is a threat to democracy, an authoritarian in waiting, and a would-be dictator if no one stops him,” conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X. “What did they think would happen?”
Not attempted murder, I can assure you of that.
Today, Donald Trump Jr. blasted CNN, The Washington Post and the press at large for recent coverage of his father, Oliver Darcy of “Reliable Sources” writes.
“Dems and their friends in the media knew exactly what they were doing with the ‘literally Hitler’ bullshit!” Don Jr. wrote on X.
It’s too easy and sophomoric to blame the press for yesterday’s shooting, but that’s where we are today in America.
Axios reporter Sophia Cai reported that, on scene, immediately after the shooting, Trump supporters tried to break into the media pen, yelling, “Fake news! This is your fault.”
“You’re next!” they shouted. “Your time is coming!”
Our time as press has been “coming” ever since Trump declared years ago that everything we do is “fake news.” My friends in the media and I have been persisting in our work despite the endless threats and harassment we’ve gotten over this past decade.
We may not take an oath like doctors do, but so many of us in the press may as well have taken a pledge to report, regardless of the danger or the opposition. I’m so proud of my colleagues today and yesterday for not listening to the extremes of society and for continuing to report no matter the danger. It’s our job, but that doesn’t mean the constant accusations and threats don’t reach us. Or that, as civilians, we as journalists don’t feel incredible sadness at the state of politics.
As my father said 30-something years ago, this is a terrible day for our country.
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It's telling that some Trump supporters' immediate response to political violence is... To threaten more political violence. Political violence, of course, only benefits the violently political. And underneath it all is a strange assumption that this will never, ever backfire.
Thanks for your very important column today. Agree with your statements. Thanks again,
imagine his minions yelling at the media box in Butler, Penn. "fake news..." oy,