The Cowards Who Walk Amongst Us

In my view, there are few things more vicious, contemptable and cowardly than directing threats and abuse at journalists. That viciousness and cowardice is compounded by the fact that most send their vitriol via encrypted, anonymous email services, and the majority seem directed against women and reporters of colour. 

Clearly, these miscreants lack the courage of their 'convictions'. Yet the damage they do is severe.

Here are a few examples of that damage:

Prior to fleeing to Canada as a refugee, Saba Eitizaz worked for the BBC in Pakistand. She left after fielding a number of death threats from the Taliban, and landed a job at the Toronto Star, but her newfound feelings of security proved to be ephemeral:

An Aug. 4 message, using a fake name and the encrypted email service Mailfence, said several men were looking at the photos of female reporters, who were described in racist, misogynistic terms. Eitizaz was singled out as the men decided “which ones need to be silenced first.”

“So I’m just waiting for a gunshot or for somebody to show up at my place or with a firearm,” Eitizaz said. “It takes just a little bit more anger or a little bit more of a feeling that you can do this with impunity for online violence to become real-life violence.”

 Eitizaz is one of several Canadian journalists — nearly all of them women, many of whom are Black, Indigenous, and women of colour — targeted by an escalating hate campaign using encrypted email services. The emails drip with racial hatred and include threats of violence and rape. In at least one case, threats were directed at a reporter’s family.

Presumably because she is a woman, a Global News reporter has also been repeatedly targeted with a variety of threats and obscenities. One of the mildest is this one:.

In Ottawa, Rachel Gilmore of Global News was told in an email that “Judgment Day is coming, sweetheart. You had better make peace with your god.”

Over at one of Torstar's sister papers, things are not any different. 

After two and half years of covering the COVID-19 pandemic and receiving an avalanche of hate mail laced with anti-vaccine conspiracy theories (and more references to the Nazis than she can remember), The Hamilton Spectator’s health reporter, Joanna Frketich, had come to believe nothing could surprise her anymore.

She was wrong.

The author of the email was playing at being cryptic, but it was only that. Playing.

It was filled with references Frketich knew well. The school her child went do. Her husband’s business. Their home address.

“Someone was threatening my children and my husband and my home. So that was something I’ve not really experienced ever in my journalism career,” Frketich said. “That took things to a whole new level for me. I pretty much try to ignore the personal attacks but that one did stop me in my tracks.”

Young journalists with limited time in the industry are feeling especially vulnerable:

The Spectator’s Fallon Hewitt, having been working in the industry only since 2018, has spent nearly half of her career working in an ecosystem of harassment.

Like Frketich, Hewitt said the pandemic radically and rapidly changed the tone of the kind of emails she received.

“It all seemed to actually relate to coverage I was doing about the pandemic,” she said. One particular story about a business that violated COVID-19 public health rules triggered a response so vitriolic that Hewitt joined the ranks of reports who wanted to avoid pandemic coverage.

The business owner fired off a message dripping with vulgar and sexist language.

“When this is all over, I honestly hope you rot in hell you sleazy piece of s--t. God forbid we ever cross paths,” the message said. “You should be f--king ashamed of yourself ... I hope you live a lonely miserable life!”

I won't reproduce some of the filth that has been directed at these people, but outside of the affront to human decency these cowardly notes represent, there is an even higher cost. According to an IPSOS survey, some 33 per cent of respondents have or are considering leaving the profession. As well, 

[t]he vitriol has left some journalists avoiding story subjects that they fear could worsen the harassment.

It is not hard to understand how all of this has developed. Egged on by people like Donald Trump in the U.S., who labelled the press "the enemy of the state," and echoed by Trump wannabes like Pierre Poilievre and Maxime Bernier in Canada, what has become know as rage farming has found especially fertile ground amongst the disaffected, the gullible, and the just-plain stupid, all supreme cowards for the tactics they employ because they cannot accept views that run contrary to their own.

However, probably the biggest victim in all of this is democracy. While I realize there are many who disdain the MSM as being mere toadies for their owners, the fact is that newspapers, as opposed to self-selected stories on social media, provide a much larger array of news and sense of the larger world than can be found by simply following our online biases. And when journalists begin to limit the stories they cover out of fear of reactionary blowback, we are all the poorer, and less-informed, for it.