When lightning strikes

By BILL CHAISSON
Logging is by far the most dangerous job in the country with 132 deaths per 100,000 people in 2017. Fishing is next at 55 deaths per 100,000. The top 10 continues downward through airplane pilots, roofers, and refuse collectors, to landscapers at 18 per 100,000. Journalists are not on the list, but around the world we know that being a journalist can be a dangerous job. Correspondents go into war zones, and they are constantly navigating horrendous roads and bridges in the middle of nowhere and encountering fauna that can to do them harm. 

Annapolis, Maryland is not that kind of a landscape and the Capital and Gazette newspapers do not employ derring-do-prone reporters. They are community newspapers like this one, and the journalists who worked there were covering local government and school events like we do.

So, when on June 28, a gunman walked into the Capital Gazette Communications offices and shot five people and wounded several others, I couldn’t help but think how blindsided those distant colleagues of mine must have been. Journalists Rob Hiaasen, 59, Wendi Winters, 65, Gerald Fischman, 61, and John McNamara, 56, and sales assistant Rebecca Smith, 34, were killed with 12-gauge pump-action shotgun in their own office at 2:30 in the afternoon. They were all undoubtedly very busy, trying to get the newspaper out, when someone who was angry about an article in the newspaper decided that they had to die.

The gunman, Jarrod Ramos, was the subject of a 2011 column in The Capital that used publicly available records to document his harassment of a woman through social media. She had three restraining orders against him and he was eventually convicted of harassment. He continued to harass her and she finally left the state.

A community newspaper is doing its job when it focuses on behavior like this. It is hoped that articles or columns like this will discourage others from engaging in similar harassment. Instead Ramos sued the newspaper for defamation and during the court proceedings vowed to kill the Capital columnist who had written about him. Then, in spite of his conviction for harassment of his former classmate, ongoing harassment of newspaper employees, and public promise to kill someone, and a torrent of hostile and threatening tweets, he was able to legally purchase a firearm.

Does this mean that being a community journalist is now a dangerous job? No, of course not. Outside of war zones, the most dangerous journalism beats are in the immigrant communities and among those reporters who cover race and civil rights issues. That is part of what makes the Annapolis murders so hard to take in: their incredible unlikelihood. Those people were probably much more likely to die in car accidents or even be struck by lightning.

But we live in an era when each individual has his or her own electronic media and they can produce programming for those media with any vetting, moderation, or editing to speak of. William Randolph Hearst famously used his media empire to foment a war with Spain. Jarrod Ramos used his social media to insult, hound, and threaten a woman and the staff of a newspaper. There are so many people like this out there that we have a word for them: troll. In the old Norwegian folk tale, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, the troll who lives under the bridge eats everyone who crosses it. In the folk tale the last billy goat to cross the bridge butted the troll into the river and killed him. In modern-day America the troll has his own electronic poison pen and in Annapolis the troll bought a shotgun.