Voices: These journalists are no enemies of the people

At the Newseum in Washington, D.C., there is a stunning glass memorial that climbs two stories, reaching toward the heavens. Etched in the panels are the names of 2,291 editors, reporters, broadcasters and photographers who died covering the news. The real news.

They were dogged investigators and quiet warriors. Some lost their lives in the grimiest of places and harshest of conditions; others in the most mundane. They were educators, information gatherers and truth tellers.

They were the friends of the people.

• David Bloom was an NBC News correspondent who died from a pulmonary embolism in 2003 while covering the war in Iraq. The embolism was believed to have been related to the many hours he spent in a confined tank-recovery vehicle dubbed the “Bloom-mobile” — a vehicle he believed gave him the closest window into the war zone.

• Jeremy Little was a freelance soundman embedded with the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division and also working for NBC News in Iraq when he was struck down in a grenade attack in 2003.

• Alaa Aziz was an ABC cameraman who was killed along with fellow ABC soundman Saif Laith Yousuf when their car was stopped by gunmen  after they left the Baghdad bureau in Iraq in 2007.

• CBS cameraman Paul Douglas, soundman James Brolan and correspondent Kimberly Dozier were riding in an armored vehicle in Iraq in 2006 when a car packed with explosives ignited at an Iraqi army checkpoint. Douglas and Brolan were killed; Dozier was seriously wounded.

• Duraid Mohammed, a producer for CNN, died of multiple gunshot wounds when the vehicle he was riding in was ambushed near Baghdad in 2004.

• New York Times reporters Sultan Munadi and Stephen Farrell were abducted by the Taliban in 2009 while covering a NATO raid in Afghanistan. A rescue mission freed Farrell; Munadi was killed.

What do people like Bloom, Aziz, Brolan, Mohammed and Munadi have in common? They share an unsettling thread: The media companies they worked for — and died for — were singled out in a blistering tweet by the president of the United States as “the enemy of the American people.”

President Trump’s disdain for the media and zingers on Twitter are not new. His claims of “fake news” from established and respected journalism entities sprouted during his campaign and have taken on a breathless pace just weeks into his presidency.

But an "enemy of the American people”? The strong-armed words are disturbing on an astonishing new level, experts say.

“It’s not unusual for American presidents to have hostile relationships with the press,” says David Schmid, professor of cultural studies at the University at Buffalo, citing Richard Nixon and Teddy Roosevelt. “But it is unprecedented for the press to be described in such a chilling way by the president.”

The label “enemy of the people” has reverberated through dark times in history. It originated with the Romans, was used during the French Revolution and became standard propaganda for the Soviet regime — justifying marginalizing, purging or killing designated “enemies,” a deliberately vague term.

“Trump’s comments echo the sentiments of some of history's worst dictators, who hated the very idea of a free press,” Schmid says. “For this reason, this description is very, very troubling.”

Reporter Alison Parker, 24, and cameraman Adam Ward, 27, were  ambushed and gunned down by a former employee from their Roanoke, Va., TV station — a CBS affiliate — on a summer morning in 2015. They were interviewing a local Chamber of Commerce official at a mountain lake resort — a piece of community journalism, not a flashy or headline-grabbing story.

Parker and Ward, like thousands of others, were just two young and passionate journalists dedicated to educating and informing the people of Roanoke. And like their colleagues memorialized on the Newseum’s sweeping wall, they were no enemies of the people.

The body of work of the more than 2,000 names on that wall should trumpet louder than any haphazard tweet.

“If we lose the concept of a free press in this country, we lose a crucial part of what it means to be American," Schmid says. “Without a free press, we have no democracy.”

Follow Miller on Twitter @susmiller