When I saw the news on CNN on my TV set overseas that day of the shootings, I saw one name on the news crawl as "Wendi Winters" and suddenly I recognized that name, because of the way Wendi spelled her name with an i rather than as Wendy and I knew her! OUCH! OMG. We were online pals and she always sent me a long Christmas letter that she sent to all her friends and family. I checked my emails with her going back to 2006. OMG.
I freaked out! In all mass shootings, we never know the people who are killed, not personally. In this case, I fell out of my chair in Taiwan in shock. OMG.
How sad. She was not even the intended victim. She had nothing to do with that shooter's insane vendetta. Life is tragic in many cases. Rest in peace, Wendi, and my condolences to all your family and relatives......
-- Dan Bloom
re:
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> Hi Dan, ... okay, I cried.
>
>
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> ----- Original Message -----
> Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2006 12:29 AM
> Subject: Hi,
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> Hi,
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> This letter came in the mail today. POWERFUL!
> DANNY
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> ==================
> letter from Susan Anderson, [Virginia Beach, 18 years ago......].
BONUS NOTES
Trump’s press attacks didn’t cause the Annapolis tragedy. But there is a connection. Says Margaret Sullivan, former NYT public editor, now writing for WAPO
Some people get it.
Some people never will.
One of those who gets it was the security guard in Denver who stopped Denver Post reporter Noelle Phillips on her way out of the building Thursday to say how upset he was about the massacre of journalists at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis.
“If you attack the press,” he told her, “you attack our democracy.”
One of those who never will is the president of the United States, who reacted to the journalistic disaster with a tepid “thoughts and prayers” tweet along with a thumbs-up sign and a dismissive wave to reporters asking for his comments.
He just kept walking away, and his body language announced, “I don’t give a damn.”
On Friday, Trump offered a statement on the killings: “This attack shocked the conscience of our nation and filled our hearts with grief. Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job.” It was heartening to hear the president say this, even if it was hard to square it with his calling the press the “enemy of the people” as he did at a rally earlier this week.
I want to be very clear: There is no reason to think that Trump’s unceasing attacks on journalists had anything directly to do with Thursday’s terrible killing of five staffers at the Capital Gazette.
Those who suggested that — including a Reuters editor who later apologized for impulsively saying that “blood is on your hands, Mr. President” — were simply wrong.
But while there is no causality, there is a connection in the attitudes of this insane paranoid mentally ill man and the president of the United States: a dangerous failure to understand the role of the media in our society. Or to acknowledge how it’s supposed to work.
Jarrod Ramos had been harassing the paper and its journalists at the Capital Gazette for years — so extremely that the paper’s former editor and publisher, Tom Marquardt, said Thursday that he had long feared that something like this could happen.
“I said during that time, ‘This guy is crazy enough to come in and blow us all away,’” Marquardt told the Los Angeles Times.
The judge who threw out Ramos’s groundless defamation case against the Annapolis paper recited to him the basics of news coverage.
“I think people who are the subject of newspaper articles, whoever they may be, feel that there is a requirement that they be placed in the best light, or they have an opportunity to have the story reported to their satisfaction,” the judge said. Good journalism has no such obligation.
The paper’s 2011 story about his conviction for criminally harassing a woman who had spurned him was accurate. There was no defamation, but an enraged Ramos kept up his abusive attacks on the woman — and the newspaper staff.
Trump seems to have pretty much the same attitude about news coverage that is true, though it may portray him in an unfavorable light.
If he does understand the role that journalists must play in a democracy — as public-spirited watchdogs, not sycophants like his friends at Fox News — he shows no indication of it.
And while the president frequently, and rightly, praises the “first responders” to a disaster, he fails to see that journalists, too, are first responders.
The small Capital Gazette staff bravely played that part on Thursday — tweeting the initial call for help, reporting immediately via social media from the scene, and managing to put out a print newspaper amid the trauma of a real-life nightmare.
The nation’s press was already under siege long before Thursday’s massacre. The number of ways seems almost infinite:
●Resources are shrinking. At Noelle Phillips’s paper in Denver, a once robust staff has been squeezed nearly to extinction by the hedge fund owners. And that is happening, to varying degrees, in nearly every community. It’s hard to be a watchdog when you’re starving to death.
●Legal threats are mounting. The Trump Justice Department, like Obama’s, has come after journalists as part of their crackdown on leaks. Just weeks ago, investigators seized the phone and email records of a New York Times reporter in a case that has alarmed First Amendment champions.
●Verbal abuse is rampant. At rally after rally, Trump has turned his amped-up crowds on journalists, encouraging insults or worse. Nastiness, and death threats, are the result.
●And Trump’s attitude has infected the entire culture, emboldening other public officials to trash press rights. It’s no wonder that America’s press-freedom ranking is sinking among the nations of the world in a recent Reporters Without Borders study.
Granted, journalists are far from perfect. We make mistakes, and often pay dearly for them in harm to our jobs or reputations. We can be unfair or show poor judgment. We certainly can be arrogant.
But we try to get it right, and usually do — as the Capital Gazette did with its accurate reporting on Ramos seven years ago, and as the national media does, day in and day out, in reporting on the Trump administration.
Trump can’t, and shouldn’t, be blamed for the Annapolis massacre.
Ms. Sullivan sees a “connection” between the appalling murders in Annapolis and President Trump’s blustering criticism of the press: “a dangerous failure to understand the role of the media in our society.” Neither Ms. Sullivan nor I is in a position to diagnose authoritatively the mental state of the killer, but doesn’t it seem more likely that he acted out of a twisted sense of personal aggrievement rather than a flawed understanding of the function of the press?
But that doesn’t make his contempt for the press any less dangerous.
5 comments:
1 day ago
Ms. Sullivan sees a “connection” between the appalling murders in Annapolis and President Trump’s blustering criticism of the press: “a dangerous failure to understand the role of the media in our society.” Neither Ms. Sullivan nor I is in a position to diagnose authoritatively the mental state of the killer, but doesn’t it seem more likely that he acted out of a twisted sense of personal aggrievement rather than a flawed understanding of the function of the press?
“maybe violence and killngs were never a part of this man's attacks on this paper before the election of Trump.”
Mr./Ms. stressedout, The vendetta of the accused against the paper began in 2011. In particular, he threatened his eventual victims with death on Feb. 2, 2015. Trump began his presidential campaign, when? Probably in late 2015. I have no use for Trump either, but some terrible things happen that aren’t because of Trump.
Actually not one thing you referenced would have stopped this killer. And the despicable Trump had no more to do with this shooting than you or I. Nuts plus guns. We will have to eliminate one or the other to stop such killings. That is the hard truth.
Ramos had a grudge about a story that put him in a bad light in 2011. He had been harassing a woman at the time. I don't know if all the talk about fake news was a factor or not.
Amen. The Capital is my local paper, where I get to read about my kids' sporting events and what is happening in my community. I've had occasion to meet a couple of the victims and have been a regular reader of some of the others. This is tragic and heartbreaking and in many (most) ways far removed from the nasty political discourse on the 24/7 cable networks and the president's ugly rhetoric about the press, but America needs to wake up and recognize how important journalists are to our freedom. My heart goes out to the families of those who lost their lives or whose lives have been forever changed by this horrific event, and I pray that it is a wake-up call to all of us to be vigilant in protecting the free press and to elect representatives who both respect the press and who support reasonable gun control efforts.
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