Following Annapolis shooting, journalists contemplate angry readers, death threats and backlash

Kevin S. Aldridge was sitting in the Xenia Daily Gazette newsroom 20 years ago when a man walked into the small-town Ohio paper's headquarters asking to see him.

"Do you know who I am?" the man asked Aldridge, then a reporter in his early 20s. "You remember that story you wrote a while back about the guy who poured gasoline all over himself and his wife? That was me!" Aldridge started to sweat. But then the man simply told Aldridge he did a nice job with the story, got up, and walked out.

Following Thursday's shooting in a newsroom in Annapolis, Md., Aldridge is now wondering: Could that have gone another way?

"It seems like every [reporter] has a story to tell about an incident that could have gone sideways but didn't," Aldridge, now a columnist at the Cincinnati Enquirer, said Friday. "Most reporters have felt in danger in a situation or uncomfortable enough to be worried about their safety."

Journalists across America face aggression on a daily basis, from mean tweets, oblique references to where they live in the comments section, or outright threats of assassination. On Thursday, a gunman identified by police as Jarrod W. Ramos blasted into the Capital and Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, killing five employees and injuring two others. Ramos apparently had a long-running dispute with the paper over its coverage of him, and had previously made threats of violence against the company.

In addition to prompting increased security at news organizations across the country, Thursday's shooting triggered a reflection of sorts for some journalists who have dealt with angry subjects and threats of violence over the years. For generations, that reader or that subject who got overly animated about coverage was just something journalists hardened themselves to. They might have even laughed about it.

Tom Birdsong, an assistant managing editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, said one reader called the newsroom thousands of times over the course of a couple years. In 2011, after a series of calls that became more threatening, the paper filed a complaint against the man, who was later found guilty of harassment by communications. Birdsong said the man didn't make specific, violent threats. He would just call dozens of times in a row.

"It was a real problem, and people were really afraid of him," Birdsong said.

In many ways, the internet has brought closer to home the abuse journalists were so long accustomed to. Tweets and emails are instant and allow for anonymity. It's easier to obtain personal information about reporters — like their home addresses — and disseminate it.

John Micek, the opinion editor at PennLive/Harrisburg Patriot-News, has twice engaged police after angry readers who didn't agree with his political stances made threats against him and his family.

"It seems like every paper has some guy who has a beef long-standing that you hear from all the time who complains about X," Micek said. "What concerns me is, is [the shooting in Annapolis] now going to embolden somebody else who has a beef long-standing with some news organization to maybe take it out this way?"

Thursday's crime was the first time in recent memory in which a U.S. newsroom was the target of a mass shooting, though violence against reporters inside America's borders is nothing new. In 1837, an angry mob killed an Alton, Ill., newspaper editor who defended his right to print abolitionist material. In 1956, a columnist in New York was blinded in an acid attack following his coverage of gangsters and corruption. In 1976, an Arizona Republic reporter died in a car bombing linked to his coverage of the Mafia.

In 1978, an ex-journalist investigating Synanon, a California drug rehab program that became a cult, was treated to a rattlesnake in his mailbox. Paul Morantz, who was acting as an attorney at the time, was bitten by the rattlesnake and rushed to the hospital. Now 72 and living in Pacific Palisades, Calif., Morantz said the climate today is much worse for journalists than it was then.

"To me," he said, "what happened with Synanon pales as to what's going on now in the United States."

Some reporters have said after the Annapolis shooting that overall rhetoric related to journalism has soured since President Trump's candidacy. Micek said he worries about the current atmosphere for reporters in the United States because the political discourse is so divisive. Aldridge said that while the erosion of trust in the media has steadily declined over the years, it "certainly has been ramped up because of a lot of the language that the president has been using."

Trump often refers to legitimate news organizations as "fake news" and has deemed the news media "the enemy of the American people."

Last year, Walmart removed a shirt from its website that read: "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required." In January, the FBI arrested a Michigan man who made a series of calls to CNN's Atlanta headquarters. The man allegedly said the network was "fake news" and on several occasions threatened to gun down CNN journalists. This week, Dana Loesch, a spokesperson for the National Rifle Association, said in a video titled "Calling Out the Media": "I'm happy to see them curb-stomped."

Talia Lavin, a 28-year-old fact-checker at the New Yorker, resigned this week after tweeting in error that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent appeared to have a Nazi symbol tattooed on his arm. She deleted the tweet and issued a correction shortly afterward, but ICE put out a news release about the tweet and a barrage of abuse followed.

Lavin said she had avoided reading some of her mentions on Twitter. But the abuse included a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi writing an article riddled with slurs, and it also resulted in PayPal suspending alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos for sending Lavin $14.88 — a number that refers to white supremacist and neo-Nazi rhetoric.

Following the incident, Lavin said she's thinking more about how newsrooms can better support reporters, particularly women and minorities, who face harassment online. Talking about that harassment rather than feeling the need to be "macho" about it is the first step toward creating a culture where journalists don't feel that being harassed on a daily basis is just part of the job, she said.

"Journalists, especially female journalists, get tons of harassment all the time where you think, 'I don't want to talk about it too much, people will think I'm weak,' " she said. "The truth is: having strangers tell you they want you to die and fail is an upsetting experience for a human being."

Death threats and doxxing — exposing someone's personal and private information on the internet — have become routine for some reporters, particularly those who cover sensitive topics. That includes staffers at the Inquirer and Daily News.

Cara Fitzpatrick, a former Tampa Bay Times reporter, covered education for the Florida paper and coauthored a Pulitzer Prize-winning series about school segregation. The reporters faced a "very racist backlash," she said, for six months while the series was ongoing.

At one point, her home address and other identifying personal information were shared on a blog. Then, she started receiving a subscription to Ebony, a monthly magazine targeted to African American readers. She took it as a not-so-thinly veiled way for someone to show they knew where she lived.

"I think every journalist I know," she said, "has been harassed in some way or another."