Two horrifying events this past month — one involving actual violence, the other the threat of it — provide vivid demonstrations that a free press is only as free so long as a society is willing to defend it. First, on October 16, a car bomb in Malta was used to assassinate Daphne Caruana Galizia, a journalist who had been deeply involved with investigating the scandalous Panama Papers. Galizia had also been a harsh critic of Malta’s prime minister. A few days later, thousands of miles away, a Republican official in Montana named Karen Marshall asserted on a radio show that she “would have shot” a journalist previously assaulted by GOP candidate Greg Gianforte. Following his literal attack on The Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs, Gianforte had still managed to be elected as Montana’s sole member to the House of Representatives, lending a voter seal of approval to his violence. (He ended up pleading guilty to misdemeanor assault; his punishment was a $385 fine, community service, and anger management classes.)
The assassination of Galizia illustrates the simultaneously powerful and vulnerable position a free press occupies in a democracy. In covering segments of our society like politics and business, journalists can expose malfeasance and effectively lay bare the sins of the powerful; in the best case scenario, they help provide a truth-based framework in which citizens can understand what is happening in their world. But the press’ role is one that ultimately depends on their ability to go about their business without fear of reprisals, up to and including violence against them. A free press is one of the lynchpins of the notion that a democracy will sort out its conflicts through words, debates, and elections, not through violence. Galizia’s killing, though, is a reminder that it is democracy’s laws that protects journalists, nothing more; in reality, the powerful or the guilty can always violate those rules.
But when this happens, it needs to be seen for what it is: an attack on a democracy’s foundations, on those who make it possible to conduct democracy’s business in the first place. Killing a journalist is a particularly specious crime, to my mind somewhat akin to targeting a doctor or teacher because of their profession — an attack on someone who serves the public interest, and whose role is by definition objective and non-violent.
By comparison to the killing of Galizia, Karen Marshall’s comments might seem simply unhinged or intemperate — but coming on top of an actual previous act of violence against Jacobs, they are particularly grotesque and noteworthy. Gianforte had already physically assaulted this reporter, but the injuries Jacobs sustained were apparently not enough to sate Marshall's blood lust — only death will do for the hapless journalist. Her statement is also notable because it’s yet another manifestation of an anti-free press stance running from the very top of the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was chock full of rallies in which he incited resentment and even violence against reporters, to the point that various journalists found themselves the targets of taunts and threats from thousands of his supporters. This flirtation with violence against reporters remains to my mind one of the most damning facts of Donald Trump’s political trajectory, one that renders him unfit for political office in our democracy. As noted above, to assault reporters is to assault our democracy; even to come up to that line without actually crossing it is beyond contempt. Part of the horror of Trump's election is that such behavior was rewarded, not punished, with dire consequences we are experiencing on literally a daily basis.
All around the world, reporters are murdered for doing their jobs. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, eighteen were murdered in 2016 alone; including Galizia, ten have been killed so far in 2017. To threaten violence against journalists cannot be treated as mere bloviation by sadistic politicians. When Republican politicians suggest importing such violence into our country, it’s another sign that the GOP hasn't simply lost its way, but has shifted to an authoritarian mindset incompatible with American democracy. The emerging strains of violence towards a free press are not signs of the right’s growing strength, but of its moral bankruptcy and ultimately, its weakness. Unable to make a case for its cause in democracy’s language, introducing the threat of violence against the physical persons of journalists is a glaring sign of its abandonment of democracy.
