Can journalists counteract hatred?

Coast based journalists protest against increased attacks on the media in September 2016. Journalism has always been a dangerous business — we go into conflicts and we deal with people with a lot at stake and high emotion. [File, Standard]

The murder of five employees of an Annapolis, Maryland, United States newspaper on June 28 by a reader nursing a years-long grudge over a story on his criminal conviction for harassing a woman was a horrifying, extreme example of a harsh reality editors everywhere face every day: Some people get really, really angry about the news and it’s a daily slog to defuse that rage and educate the public on the vital role of the press in a free society.

In an era of tribal politics and hateful discourse, against a backdrop of the President Donald Trump’s relentless vilification of the press as “enemies of the people,” and with polls including a Poynter survey showing only one in five Republicans trusts the news media, there is more vitriol being spewed and magnified by online trolls and bots than most of us can remember in our lifetimes.