Month: July 2018

It is cold comfort, of course, but the murderous assault on The Annapolis Capital’s newsroom on June 28 was a colossal failure for the shooter.
If the shooter’s goal was to silence The Capital’s voice, he obviously failed at that. The paper has not missed an issue.
If he hoped to settle some years-old score, some twisted grievance against a columnist and an editor long gone from the paper, he missed entirely. Both were elsewhere when he attacked the newsroom.
If he thought he could echo the “fake news” and “enemy of the people” accusations that are hurled at President Trump’s rallies, he did not.
If, most importantly, he thought he could isolate the Capital from Annapolis by killing five of its finest people, his attack had exactly the opposite effect.
In fact, the tragedy instead vividly illustrated the extraordinary bond that exists between a community and its newspaper that, in the case of The Capital and Annapolis, has been built up in good times and bad over nearly three centuries.
That bond was expressed in the universal horror among Annapolitans at the first news of the attack, by the poignant candlelit vigil down Main Street the night after the shooting, by the flags at half-staff, by the applause that welcomed the contingent of Capital staffers in the July 4 parade and by the outpouring of sympathy and support that continues every day in every issue of The Capital.
That bond between the community and its newspaper was not nearly so obvious before the shooter acted. (Note: I’m deliberately not using the shooter’s name, lest he get some of the notoriety that he apparently craves.) Like any town and its newspaper, there have been controversies and even angry arguments over specific issues over the years between the Capital and some of its readers. Such battles are inevitable and doubtless will not stop.
But we can now see, from the public reaction to this attack, that the people of Annapolis care deeply about their newspaper and consider it an essential, integral part of the community.
“Journalism Matters” t-shirts dotted the July 4 parade, along with others that read: “Press ON Annapolis, “Annapolis Strong” and “Respect the Locals.” Those sentiments may not be surprising given what has happened, but they were not apparent or so close to the surface before the June 28 attack. The Annapolis public clearly sees the journalists at The Capital as what they are, not “enemies of the people,” but the people themselves.
The question has been raised whether the shooter was motivated or inspired by the hostile anti-media attitudes expressed nationally these days. Only he can answer that definitively, but put me down as skeptical. From everything we have learned about the shooter’s long-standing grudge with the paper, his assault appears to have been a personal act of vengeance rather than a political statement. He was trying to settle a personal score, not make some broader comment about the media. Even in that, he failed.
The true victims, of course, are the five who perished: Gerald Fischman, 61, the editorial page editor; Rob Hiaasen, 59, editor and columnist; John McNamara, 56, sportswriter; Rebecca Smith, 34, sales assistant and Wendi Winters, 65, features writer. And their families. And the two staffers who were injured, but survived.
The people of Annapolis have already shown their appreciation of the victims and will continue do so through the Families Fund that has been established. A fund-raising concert is being planned for later in the summer.
These and other efforts will illustrate again and again the palpable bond between the city and its newspaper that seems stronger than ever after the shooting.

In the end, after two nightmarish days set off by the mad shooting June 28 in the newsroom of the Annapolis Capital, after countless questions in a score of radio and television interviews, after trying to explain the unexplainable, it was the candlelit vigil down Main Street on Friday night that got to me. As a life-long journalist, I am supposed to be detached from the stories I cover, but this one hit my soul.
The vigil marchers were silent as they headed toward Annapolis’ City Dock. The respectful spectators on the sidewalks barely made a sound.
“Honor the journalists,” said one speaker at the rally of the five who died, of the injured and of those that worked tirelessly to put out a fine Friday edition of the paper under the most difficult of circumstances. In the darkness, the audience applauded and the intimate bond between the people of Annapolis and The Annapolis Capital was palpable.
Speaker Mike Busch, the delegate for Annapolis, spoke of his hometown paper — “The Evening Capital,“ he called it, as it once was known. He said he knew four of the five journalists “who were murdered.” “Murdered,” he repeated, “there is no other way to put it.” He was right.
As a guest columnist who has written in this space for the last three-plus years, I am not a member of the Capital staff, nor can I speak for them. But I’d like to think that I am a distant cousin in the Capital family and certainly I am a colleague.
As such, I fielded dozens of requests Thursday and Friday for interviews from near and far. News organizations called me for comment because editor Rick Hutzell and the surviving staff had rightly decided to devote all their energy into putting out their newspaper. “I’ll let my column speak for me,” Rick explained to me in an email Saturday morning. The “speechless,” nearly blank Capital editorial page on Friday was eloquent in its emptiness.
The breadth of national and international interest in the Annapolis story was remarkable. I got requests for comment from all over the United States, from Canada, the U.K., Australia and Brazil. This assault on journalists and journalism resonated far and wide.
As it happened, Jared Ramos’s attack appeared to be an act of personal vengeance, not partisan politics. He seemed to be settling a score against the newspaper, not scoring points in some ideological debate about “fake news.”
The journalists Ramos killed were not “enemies of the people,” they were “the people.” They were people doing a job that is worthy and protected by the first amendment to the constitution.
May they rest in peace.