Beware politicians who incite ire against journalists

Why is it that empowered women bring out such rage in the kind of people who wear MAGA hats and turn politics into a morality play of good versus evil? When Global News journalist Rachel Gilmore asked Pierre Poilievre some perfectly apt questions, she was personally attacked. Red alert. Beware of anyone who won’t answer questions and wants to be prime minister. Poilievre absurdly accused Gilmore of laying traps for him, and described her as a “so-called” journalist. He then accused her agency, Global News, of being a mouth-piece for the Liberal government. His message is clear: if you don’t want to suck up, then shut up. Neither Gilmore nor Global News needs me to defend them. Both Gilmore and Global's Ottawa bureau chief Mercedes Stephenson can hold their own—whether against contemptuous politicians like Poilievre, or cowards who hide behind obscene and threatening tweets. But this issue needs some broad airing in the public. Why? Because what populist politicians like Poilievre either don’t understand, or don’t care about, is that their own abusive actions against a journalist encourage the idiot fringe to take it a step further. One day a political leader attacks the media, and the next day journalists are not merely getting critiques, they’re getting death threats. A disproportionate number of those threats are aimed at women. According to a UNESCO report from 2021, journalists from around the world are under “unprecedented” attack. The Guardian reported that of the massive number of hate comments left on their website in 2016, the top ten targets broke down like this: eight were women, two were Black men, and one of those men was gay. And get this. As reported by The Guardian, just two female journalists—Maria Ressa of the Philippines, and Carole Cadwalladr in the United Kingdom—accounted for an astronomical number of threats. Ressa received 90 hate messages an hour on Facebook alone. Another female journalist, Ghana Oueiss, who works for Al Jazeera television, gets one death threat every day she is on air. There are no clean hands when it comes to tolerating this abusive, sexist, and gutter-bottom behaviour. Law enforcement needs to step into the picture in a big way when anyone’s life or safety is threatened. Social media platforms talk a good game about moderating hate messages, but the fact is a lot of women keep on getting them. The block button is no substitute for shutting the haters down. Twitter needs to give its head a shake and wake up. But the truly revolting players in these acts of cyber-misogyny are populist politicians. A survey quoted in The Guardian showed that 40 per cent of these hate attacks are triggered by the words of politicians. It has been widely reported that Rodrigo Duterte, the former leader of the Philippines, publicly suggested that journalists are not immune from assassination. Former U.S. president Donald Trump routinely attacked specific journalists, including female media members, and told his followers that the press was the “enemy of the people.” He taught his followers to hate not only factual information, but the people who bring it to America’s television screens and newspapers. And who can forget Trump’s stupefying attacks on Greta Thunberg as a know-nothing teenager? Or his comment about female presidential candidate Carly Fiorina as being too ugly for the job? “Look at that face,” he said in his inimitable, cringeworthy style. There is no doubt that the language used by populist politicians acts as a starting gun for some of their sketchier followers to cross the line into violence. Violence was even a feature of Trump rallies for a time, where he once said about a heckler, “I’d like to punch him in the face.” His lies have been equally incendiary. He publicly presented the recent search of his Mar-a-Lago residence as a “raid,” and says authorities “broke into” his safe. His party magnified the hate. The FBI were goons or the Gestapo. Just words? Not on your life. Shortly after those outbursts by politicians, death threats began to pour in against FBI officers. One lunatic took it a step further. He showed up at the FBI’s field office in Cincinnati with body armour and an AR-15, ready to kill agents, as his social media postings confirmed. He himself was shot dead at the scene of his attack. Republican Congressional candidate Carl Paladino of New York said the U.S. Attorney General, Merrick Garland, who signed off on the search warrant of Trump’s Florida residence, should be impeached, if not executed. There is a now an urgent push in the United States to provide special security for judges whose lives are at risk because of online hate campaigns. Two men were recently convicted of conspiring to kidnap Governor of Michigan Gretchen Whitmer. Why? They didn’t like restrictions her government adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sort of like the mob that descended on Ottawa in 18-wheelers and held the place hostage for three weeks. Pierre Poilievre stood with them and other right-wing extremists who didn’t like vaccine mandates and hated Justin Trudeau. As noted by leadership rival Jean Charest—the only real national hope the CPC has—Poilievre sided with the people who were breaking the law. It is heartbreaking to read Rachel Gilmore’s tweets about what has happened to her since Poilievre’s ugly, public rebuke. She reports that someone who appears to have guns or access to them made threats not just against her, but to her entire family. Fortunately, she has taken this deadly important matter to the police, a refreshing change from similar reports of abuse of female journalists that go unreported because nothing gets done about them. The person who threatened Gilmore and her family should be in jail. The Hill Times columnist Erica Ifill has been on the receiving end of racist, sexist, hate and threats. The Hill Times photograph by Andrew Meade And so should the vile bastard who sent Erica Ifill, whose work appears in The Hill Times, the ugliest racist hate mail I have ever seen. But it’s not good enough, not by a long shot, to denounce this spittle-flecked trash from the bottom of very troubled hearts. If the current political landscape teaches us anything, it is that hateful words lead by a direct route to hateful deeds. That is what the riot at the U.S. Capitol was all about: Trump’s words “to fight like hell.” And so they did. If we don’t want a future that is blood-red like the one that is emerging in the United States, the seemingly inevitable decent into what the crazies call the “boogaloo” or second Civil War, it’s got to be zero tolerance for hate attacks on female journalists, and all public figures for that matter. It’s time for truly feminist politicians to get their shit together and demonstrate that there will be serious legal consequences when someone attacks and terrorizes female journalists, whether the weapon used is a gun, a tweet, or words from a politician’s mouth that light the fuse. No one expects Pierre Poilievre to take selfies with journalists. Just answer their questions and leave it up to the audience to decide who has the integrity problem. Michael Harris is an award-winning author and journalist. The Hill Times