Deadline

In Deadline: 200 Years of Violence against Journalists in the United States, Elizabeth Atwood offers the first comprehensive look at the history of fatal attacks against journalists in the United States between 1829 and the present. Atwood describes the political, technological, and economic context of these assaults, and includes brief biographies of the victims and accounts of what happened both them and to their assailants after the attacks.   To help us understand these attacks, Atwood presents a framework for categorizing them, built on John Nerone’s studies on assaults on American media workers. Atwood categorizes attacks against journalists as attacks against individuals, ideas, and media institutions, and undertaken to suppress reporting on certain topics and in the context of wars and other international or conflicts. Crucially, Deadline utilizes this framework to offer possible solutions to the issue of violence against journalists.   Atwood was inspired to explore the pressing issue of violence against American journalists after the tragic death of one of her colleagues at the Baltimore Sun, Rob Hiaasen, in the Capital Gazette shooting in 2018. Throughout, she demonstrates that distrust of the media and violence against the press in the United States are hardly new developments. Her work examines how intimidation, violence, and censorship have, in fact, been used against the American press since both its and the nation’s founding.