An interview with author Elizabeth Atwood
Elizabeth Atwood spent seven years trying to figure out exactly how many American journalists had been killed for their work. In her book, Deadline: 200 Years of Violence Against Journalists in the United States (University of Missouri Press), Atwood puts a figure on it for the first time—at least seventy-nine—and traces a two-century shift in why journalists get killed in the first place.
Atwood, an associate professor of journalism at Hood College and a former editor at the Baltimore Sun, began the research after the 2018 shooting at the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, where she knew one of the victims. We spoke with her over Zoom as part of our America 250 coverage, about the founders’ complicated relationship with the free press they created, what’s changed and what hasn’t in how the country punishes violence against journalists, and what a memorial can and can’t do about any of it.
FJMF: What made you write this book?
Elizabeth Atwood: The impetus began after the shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis in 2018. That happened in Maryland, where I live, and it sent a shock through the whole journalism community here. I knew Rob Hiaasen, one of the victims—we had worked together at the Baltimore Sun, where I was an editor and he was a reporter. It was shocking to actually know someone who had been killed. And then the second shock was that this was a small community newspaper. It wasn’t the kind of paper doing big gotcha journalism, and the attack happened in a suburban office building. All the things you’d think might make a newsroom a target were absent.
That prompted me to ask why this could happen, and then a second question: how many times had it happened before? How many journalists have been killed in this country because of their work? I did a quick search just to satisfy my own curiosity, and I realized there was no answer. The first result I got was something like thirty journalists. No one actually knew. That’s what set me off. I wanted to find out how many, and why, and eventually, whether there was anything we could recommend to prevent it from happening again.
FJMF: In addition to the number itself, of journalists who’ve been killed in this country, what surprised you about your study?
Elizabeth Atwood: I think most of us, when we picture a journalist killed for their work, imagine someone like Don Bolles, who was killed by corrupt officials or organized crime to stop an investigation. That’s the story we assume is the whole story. What surprised me is that it’s only one reason among several why journalists were attacked, and those reasons changed as journalism itself changed.
I also hadn’t anticipated the breadth of who these victims were. Young reporters and old editors. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian journalists. People working in newspapers, radio, television, social media. Small towns and big cities, every region of the country. I didn’t expect the reach of it.
FJMF: For much of the nineteenth century, the predominant reason that journalists were killed was personal disputes—things like duels and street fights. How does that type of violence evolve over time?
Elizabeth Atwood: It did surprise me, but it makes sense once you understand who these people were. The editors and printers of that era were highly partisan, writing in a volatile political climate, and they had no qualms about personal attacks like insulting someone’s wife, their mother, or their family. In the South and the West especially, a disparaging comment like that could provoke a duel, or in less formal cases, just two men in the street pulling guns on each other.
I separate that from a second category: journalists attacked not for a personal insult but for an idea the assailant found objectionable—abolition, temperance, and so on. Elijah Lovejoy is the most famous example, killed in Alton, Illinois for advocating abolition in a community that didn’t want to hear it.
As journalism changed, so did the types of dangers the profession faced. The Civil War brought reporters and artists into the field, which made them vulnerable to a different kind of violence. Later, as investigative journalism developed in the twentieth century, we start to see journalists killed specifically to stop their reporting, which is closer to what most people already assume is the norm.
FJMF: There’s a real tension in the founding generation—Jefferson, for example, said he’d take newspapers without a government over a government without newspapers, but then turned sharply critical of the press once elected to office. Were we overstating the promise of a free press from the start?
Elizabeth Atwood: I think the tension comes down to what those founders believed was the role of the press. Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Washington—they believed in a free press as a way to educate citizens and circulate ideas, including their own. They had no social media, no television. The press was how you got your ideas out, so as the founders split into political parties, they leaned on it heavily as a vehicle to spread their views.
What they did not sign up for was the same press turning around and holding them personally accountable. Both Hamilton and Jefferson had their private lives dragged into print—that’s where they parted ways with their own principle. James Callender is the character who embodies that best. He wrote about Hamilton’s affair with Maria Reynolds, then wrote about Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and was paid by both sides at different points. As the parties grew more antagonistic, journalists became tools each side was willing to use against the other.
FJMF: Journalism itself has professionalized enormously since then, with more rigor and higher standards. Has that reduced the violence, or just changed its cause?
Elizabeth Atwood: It’s just changed the reason. There does seem to be a correlation between heated political rhetoric and violence turning on journalists—they get blamed, almost as if killing the messenger were still on the table. And we haven’t even talked about social media, which in some ways resembles the reckless, irresponsible statements editors were making in the early nineteenth century.
I’d also point out that the idea of journalistic objectivity—the standard people now invoke when they say the press should be neutral—is a late-twentieth-century phenomenon. For most of American history, the model was different: throw ideas out, debate them rigorously, let citizens decide. Objectivity as a goal came later, and some would argue it never fully existed even as an aspiration.
FJMF: You write about Charles Wickliffe, acquitted in seven minutes for killing an editor in 1829. Cases like Jeff German’s, two centuries later, where the killer received a life sentence, look very different. What changed?
Elizabeth Atwood: It’s hard to imagine how violent this country used to be. In the early 1800s, for certain offenses, people believed the only recourse was to take matters into their own hands. If a journalist had insulted someone’s honor, libel law wasn’t seen as adequate. Dueling was illegal in every one of these states, but the public hadn’t bought into that prohibition yet. So when a journalist was killed in a duel or street fight, juries—especially in the South and West, where the code of honor ran deep—believed the journalist had brought it on himself.
That mentality faded, especially after the Civil War, and not just for journalists. Dueling and street violence stopped being seen as an honorable response to insult. The laws had been on the books all along, but what changed was that the public came to believe in them, and juries started actually enforcing them. Today, when a journalist is killed and the case is prosecuted, juries treat it like any other murder. That is real progress, and it’s worth calling hopeful.
FJMF: But the reasons for the violence have also moved to something more abstract—from a personal grudge, to stopping a specific investigation, to what you call hatred of the media institution itself. The Capital Gazette shooter didn’t personally know most of the people he killed. Is that trajectory as worrying as it sounds?
Elizabeth Atwood: I think it is. Some people would say these attackers are simply mentally unstable, deranged. I’m reluctant to accept that, because it gives us permission to do nothing: if it’s unavoidable, there’s no fix to pursue. I don’t think the man who killed five people at the Capital Gazette was any more unstable than someone who walked into a newspaper editor’s office in the 1800s and shot him. The outcome in the jury’s mind was completely different, but the underlying instability isn’t obviously greater.
What I do think is happening is a broader falling away of trust in and appreciation for journalism generally. People have lost some understanding that journalists are supposed to report things that are offensive sometimes, that expose corruption, that lead to a politician’s downfall—that this is the job working correctly, not evidence that it’s broken.
On the question of whether stricter laws would help: I looked hard at this and never fully resolved it. There have been repeated efforts in Congress to pass a Journalist Protection Act, which would make attacking a journalist a federal offense, but it has never made it out of committee. Mexico has a constitutional provision against it, and the evidence there is that it hasn’t made much difference. The people who kill journalists today know, almost without question, that they will be caught and sentenced to life. They act anyway. That suggests the deterrent effect of stricter law is limited when someone is acting from ideology or rage rather than a calculation of consequences.
FJMF: So if not law alone, what’s the toolbox?
Elizabeth Atwood: I looked at three areas: stricter laws, which we’ve discussed; better training and equipment, which the Committee to Protect Journalists advocates for strongly and which genuinely helps journalists covering wars, protests, and street violence; and public relations efforts, which include campaigns and memorials. That third category is where I ended up putting the most weight.
A memorial has a real role to play, both in educating the public about what journalists do and in remembering the people who died doing it. Almost everyone in this study, even the nineteenth-century editors dueling in the street, believed genuinely in their right to publish and were willing to defend it. A memorial says: we’re going to recognize that these people died, and we’re going to think about what journalism does for a democracy. There’s real evidence that memorials can do that kind of work—Holocaust memorials, war memorials—they give people a chance to reflect on sacrifice and to think about what they owe the people still doing that work now.
There are of course limits, too. Someone who has already decided the media is more a menace than an asset probably isn’t going to visit a memorial or a website and change their mind. We still have wars despite war memorials. Antisemitic violence continues despite Holocaust memorials—some of which have themselves been vandalized. A memorial doesn’t end hatred. What I think it can do, especially for young people, is plant something. I tell my students that going into journalism is a public service—nobody is getting rich doing this, and most of the journalists in this book never did either. A few students choose it because they come to see it the way they’d see becoming a firefighter or a teacher. I think a memorial, especially reaching students in a classroom, can be part of what makes someone choose that.
FJMF: If someone takes away just one thing from your book, or from a visit to the memorial, what should it be?
Elizabeth Atwood: That there is such a thing as objective truth. It’s not the case that every opinion is equally valid, or that truth is simply relative. The world is complicated, and we need analysis and we need opinion—but when a journalist is out there reporting, the assumption should not be that they’re out to get someone, or that what they’re reporting is fake.
I know plenty of journalists don’t live up to that standard, and journalism has damaged its own credibility in real ways. But I’d like the next generation to understand that despite the mistakes, despite the human failures, we need a press that holds power accountable and reports what’s true. That idea—that there is a truth worth reporting—is what I’d want people to walk away with.