In all the years I worked for daily newspapers, we had an unbending rule about readers wishing to express themselves in public. They had to show the courage of their convictions by attaching their name to their words.
All Letters to the Editor had to be confirmed with a phone call, and all thoughts attached to signatures, before they appeared in the newspaper. This accomplished a couple of things. It assigned blame, or credit. And it maintained a level of civility.
We’ve lost it now. Technology has allowed millions of us to communicate spontaneously, and venomously, and anonymously. The last is delivering untold damage, as witnessed by the tragedy last week in an Annapolis newsroom, and the anonymous reaction to it.
Five dead in the newsroom of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, and a Sunday editorial in the paper laments an aftermath that includes “death threats and emails from people we don’t know celebrating our loss.”
“People we don’t know” – the cowardly, the sick, the ones lacking any sense of their heartlessness who decide to pile on in the midst of catastrophe.
Five dead from a demented man with a record for issuing threats but somehow had access to a shotgun, and the same editorial adds, “We won’t forget being called an enemy of the people.”
The last reference is clear enough. This president issues empty words of “thoughts and prayers” — but not until he’s poisoned the atmosphere with his repeated slander that reporters are “enemies of the American people.”
No, we’re not blaming Donald Trump for the killings in Annapolis. That’s overstating the case. It’s not that Trump gave license to this particular madman, who was crazy without anybody else’s help.
It’s that President Trump contributes so mightily to the raw antagonism of our time with his pugnacious speeches, his impulsive tweeting, his public insults, his calls to supporters to rough up protesters “and I’ll take care of” any legal costs.
“A violent attack on innocent journalists doing their job is an attack on every American,” declares Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary.
Oh, please.
Has this woman not been listening to her boss’s bluster?
The same week as the Annapolis shootings, this president went to South Carolina, where reporters covering his speech were confronted at close range by Trump supporters shouting obscenities at them.
Does anyone imagine this is mere coincidence?
It’s not that this president caused the shooting in Annapolis. It’s that, as president, he’s now legitimized the ugliness, the raw antagonism, that darkens the country.
The biggest difference between Trump, with his “enemies of the American people” remarks, and those people sending their messages of hate to the Capital Gazette, is that Trump can’t do it anonymously.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” published by the Johns Hopkins University Press, is now in paperback.
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