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Column: The sorry history of journalists killed in the U.S. for doing their job

 
Washington Post photo by Calla Kessler Anne Arundel County Police Chief William Krampf holds a press conference about the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis on Thursday. The reporter right behind him in the blue shirt is the Capital Gazette's Pat Furgurson, reporting the news after five co-workers were killed and several others gravely injured in a mass shooting. Because that's what journalists do.
Washington Post photo by Calla Kessler Anne Arundel County Police Chief William Krampf holds a press conference about the Capital Gazette shooting in Annapolis on Thursday. The reporter right behind him in the blue shirt is the Capital Gazette's Pat Furgurson, reporting the news after five co-workers were killed and several others gravely injured in a mass shooting. Because that's what journalists do.
Published June 29, 2018

An attack on a newspaper is the same as an attack on the Constitution, on the nation's earliest face of the First Amendment.

Thursday's murders at the local newspaper in Annapolis, Md., were allegedly committed by a man who police say staged "a targeted attack on the Capital Gazette."

The targeted killing of journalists is something we think of as happening elsewhere — in Mexico, where journalists are gunned down by drug lords and their cronies; in Russia, where journalist critics of Vladimir Putin turn up dead; in Syria and Afghanistan; in France, where Islamic State supporters massacred Charlie Hebdo magazine journalists.

It hasn't happened to a newspaper journalist in the United States in more than 10 years; in 2007, Chauncey Bailey, who edited the weekly Oakland Post, was gunned down to shut down his reporting about Oakland's Your Black Muslim Bakery, whose financial and personnel problems Bailey had been covering.

The man suspected in Thursday's massacre had a longstanding beef with the Capital Gazette because it covered his criminal case, a matter of public record. That's what hometown newspapers do routinely every day: write about crime, courts, local government, prep sports, schools, police and fire, the community's doings.

American journalism's first martyr was Elijah Parish Lovejoy. He was a Presbyterian minister and newspaper publisher who wrote so passionately against slavery that, three different times, Missouri mobs destroyed his printing presses. In 1837, he moved to the presumed safety of Illinois, where another crowd of pro-slavery rioters torched his building, shot him to death and threw his printing press in the river.

To former president John Quincy Adams, Lovejoy was "the first martyr to the freedom of the press, and the freedom of the slave." A couple of months after Lovejoy's death, a young Illinois lawmaker named Abraham Lincoln spoke of the incident, and even 20 years later recalled it in a letter as "the single most important event that ever happened in the new world," because it lit the fuse that in time exploded the nation into civil war.

Lovejoy's name appears first on the list of hundreds on the memorial wall at the Newseum, the Washington museum of journalism. Five more names must now be added to that wall — the single biggest number of journalists targeted for death in this nation's history.

The risk has always been there. During the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s, white Southern newspaper editors and publishers who editorialized support for the civil rights movement faced canceled subscriptions, canceled ads and death threats — still nothing compared to what black activists endured — but the only reporter known to have been murdered during that period was a Frenchman, Paul Guihard. In September 1962, he was found shot in the back in Jackson, Miss., where white protests greeted black student James Meredith when he tried to enroll at the university there. Guihard's murder is unsolved.

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Every day, and now more and more each year, newspaper reporters and radio, TV and online news reporters across this country get hate mail, hate email, even death threats. Some are preposterous; some are all too plausible. Within hours of Thursday's murders, Buzzfeed writer Anne Helen Petersen tweeted, "I've had people email death threats, threaten to cut my dog's throat, tell me I'd pay for my fake news."

A healthy tension between the press and politicians is as old as the country, and actually an important part of its governance. Once in a while, it gets dangerously, disastrously unhealthy.

The second president of the United States, John Adams, threw newspapermen in prison under laws that, like English law, were broad enough to imprison people for almost any criticism of the government. Editors, publishers, a member of Congress and Benjamin Franklin's publisher (who was also his grandson) were put behind bars, and countless other newspapermen were intimidated into silence, which is exactly what the targeting of journalists is meant to do: to shut them up. The election of Thomas Jefferson and the affirmation of the First Amendment soon put an end to this persecution.

And today we have the sneering and insults from a presidential candidate who became the president of the United States. His "fake news" retorts try to diminish stories he doesn't like, and the "scum" journalists who reported them. He called the press "the enemy of the people."

Still, we persist. We are the people's intelligence service, and in an age when social media allow Americans to wall themselves off from information they don't like, and from people they don't agree with, we deliver the news version of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's maxim that "the good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

Attacks on journalists are meant to silence voices and intimidate others. After Chauncey Bailey's murder, and after the 1976 bombing-killing of Arizona investigative reporter Don Bolles, reporters rallied to finish the work these two men had started. Their guiding principle: "You can't kill a story by killing a journalist."

Its newsroom was still a crime scene Thursday night when the Capital Gazette tweeted the same sentiment, "Yes, we're putting out a damn paper tomorrow."

© 2018 Los Angeles Times