Incident charts a disturbing spike in intimidation and violence toward journalists following hateful bombast from politicians.

When police raided the office of a Kansas newspaper last week and tore through the homes of its reporters, Donald Trump’s oft-heard refrain that the US media is “the enemy of the people” might not have been uppermost in the officers’ minds.

But an invasion that was likened to “Hitler tactics” by the newspaper’s co-owner, who subsequently died, and a wave of other recent attacks on journalists and media outlets across America, can be directly tied to the enmity whipped up by the former president and his ilk, analysts say.

“There has certainly been an increase in hostility towards the press, driven by the rhetoric from presidential candidates and public officials, which then infect lower levels of government, including police departments, and that leads to instances like we saw in Kansas,” said Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

“It’s hard to say whether any one incident in isolation is part of the trend, but when you’ve got those attitudes out there becoming pervasive in society, including among law enforcement, and when the public is buying some of those ideas and not serving as a check on public officials, that creates a problem.”

The raid on the Marion County Record, seemingly at the behest of an influential local restaurant owner who wanted to hide a drunk-driving conviction, follows a disturbing recent spike in threats, intimidation and violence towards journalists in America.

In June, three New Hampshire men were charged with harassing and intimidating two National Public Radio reporters and vandalizing the homes of their family members. In Oklahoma’s McCurtain county, a discussion between the sheriff and public officials about executing reporters was recorded by the local newspaper.

There have also been deadly episodes. Last year Jeff German, an investigative reporter with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was stabbed to death at his home, allegedly by a public administrator whose wrongdoing he had exposed. The killing had parallels with the murders of five newspaper staff by a gunman who attacked the office of the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland, in 2018.

The non-partisan US press freedom tracker database has recorded almost 1,750 “violations” since 2017, including hundreds of actions against the media by law enforcement, politicians or private citizens.

The incidents coincide with, or perhaps reflect, a decline in the industry that has seen local newspapers closing at a rate of two a week, and created vast “news deserts” across the country that in turn weaken democracy by removing scrutiny of, and accountability for those in public office.

“In the past, whatever they thought of the national media, most folks had local papers, local news outlets they relied on to know what was going on in their own communities, and that they trusted. When they thought of journalists they thought of the reporter from the local paper,” Stern said.

“Now a lot of those local papers are out of business or a shell of themselves, so the trust people used to develop in the media based on reading their local paper is gone. People are looking at hyperbole on cable news and reacting to whichever side of the equation they take offense to, and forming their entire perspective on the value of journalism based on that.

Read more at The Guardian