While their colleagues died around them, they reported by tweet from beneath their desks. Because that is what journalists do.
They put out a paper this morning that chronicled their own tragedy, because that is what journalists do.
They hold public officials accountable for their words and their deeds. Sit through droning meetings about sewer rates so you won't have to. Poke their noses in where people who have something to hide think they don't belong ... and stage hand-to-hand combat with balky connections that always seem to fail right on top of deadline ... and quell the rising panic that comes when there's a big story to be told and a blank screen is staring at you, that lonely blinking cursor mocking your efforts to make the words come.
They afflict the comfortable, and comfort the afflicted. Because that is what journalists do.
This sometimes makes them unpopular, even in a nation whose constitution recognizes their worth. If we're doing our jobs even half right, we make people angry sometimes. In 40 years as a sports journalist, most of them as a columnist paid for my opinions, I have made plenty of people angry. I have been shouted at on the phone. Letters have come to me in what I dubbed Angry Cap Font. And I've gotten more emails than I can count questioning my parentage, my intelligence, my manhood.
One night, at a hockey game, I was standing in a hallway when a man brushed past me. He didn't stop. He didn't make eye contact. All he did, as he breezed past, was growl "Not a fan."
Then he was gone.
It was funny at the time; I actually laughed. But when I thought about it later, it seemed decidedly creepy.
And yet, I got off easy compared to some of my colleagues. None of the people I angered, to my knowledge, was mentally unhinged. Can't say that for some of those with whom a few courts and cop shop reporters I've known have had to deal.
And so in hindsight I guess I'm not surprised by what happened at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., yesterday, only that it doesn't happen more often. A madman with a grudge walked into the newsroom and killed five people, among them the brother of famed Miami Herald columnist and novelist Carl Hiaasen. The gunman apparently had a long-standing beef with this paper in particular. But it needs saying that he's not the only madman with a grudge against the free press these days.
Chief among them is the Madman in Chief, who may not have influenced the shooter in Maryland but who has poisoned the well against journalists in a way that is both unprecedented and reckless. When you daily smear the character and integrity of journalists because they're doing an indispensable job -- holding a corrupt and shameless chief executive accountable for his lies and inventions -- you do more than undermine faith in a free society's institutions. You imperil that very society.
And when you call the free press the "enemy of the people," as Our Only Available President also has?
You reveal that are you not a true defender of the American faith. Because those are the words of a despot, not the leader of a democratic republic.
It has been my privilege, and the highlight of my professional life, to call myself a journalist. To work with some of the most dedicated, passionate, decent human beings I have ever known anywhere. To accept that so much of what we do and how we do it is so badly understood by the public, especially when that public is being willfully misled by a charlatan.
"We do our best to share the stories of people, those who make our community better," the Capital Gazette's community news editor, Jimmy DeButts, tweeted yesterday. "Please understand, we do all this to serve our community. We try to expose corruption. We fight to get access to public records & bring to light the inner workings of government despite major hurdles put in our way. The reporters & editors put their all into finding the truth. That is our mission. Will always be."
And so there was no doubt what was going to happen this morning. It's what happens every day all over the country, even in a greatly diminished landscape. It's what happened the morning after the blizzard of '78 in Anderson, Indiana, where the guy driving this sentence was a kid sportswriter.
We got the paper out, is what happened. Only a handful of people made it to the office in the wake of the worst winter storm of my lifetime, but we got the paper out.
And so to yesterday, and a Capital Gazette reporter named Chase Cook.
"I can tell you this," Cook tweeted, on a day of unimaginable horror. "We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow."
Damn right they were. And did.
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