Just how testy is the political climate getting in these United States of America?
Let’s consider this for a moment: A Republican candidate for Montana’s at-large congressional seat allegedly assaulted a reporter, “body slamming” him, breaking his eyeglasses and possibly inflicting some injury to one of the reporter’s elbow.
Montanans are going to vote Thursday to decide who should replace Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke in the U.S. House of Representatives. The GOP candidate is Greg Gianforte; the Democrat is Rob Quist.
A reporter for the Guardian, Ben Jacobs, wanted to question Gianforte at an event in Bozeman, Mont., about the Congressional Budget Office scoring of the GOP health care overhaul legislation. Gianforte didn’t want to talk to Jacobs, which is when he assaulted him, according to eyewitnesses, telling Jacobs to “get the hell out of here!”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/may/24/greg-gianforte-bodyslams-reporter-ben-jacobs-montana
I worked in daily journalism for nearly 37 years. I had my share of strained relationships with news sources over that time. They included individuals of both political parties. They were members of Congress, judges, county commissioners, city council members, school board trustees. We would have strained exchanges caused by some difficult questions I would ask them.
No one ever, not a single time, ever so much as threatened to attack me — even though I once angered a Texas state district judge enough that he looked for more than a year for a way to sue me for libel; he came up empty when he couldn’t find a lawyer to represent him. For the life of me, this apparent encounter between a congressional candidate and a member of the media seems to suggest that the coarsening of media-politician relations has reached some sort of undefinedĀ level of hostility.
What do you suppose is the source of this intense anger? I’ll venture a guess. It might be a result of the kind of atmosphere prevalent at Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign rallies in 2016. You’ll recall the kind of response Trump would elicit from crowds when he spoke of the media, which he labeled “dishonest.”
Once elected, the president then referred to the media as the “enemy of the American people.”
Might this have been the response of an American politician lashing out at an “enemy”?