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Where Darkness Surrounds Violence AUTHOR
Brendan Fitzgerald
A
fter January 6, when pro-Trump insurrectionists and far-right extremists invaded the Capitol, Timothy Snyder, a history professor and the author of On Tyranny, warned of rising domestic terrorism at a time of declining local news. “If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions,” Snyder wrote for the New York Times. “Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around.” Between 2005 and 2020, right-wing domestic extremists were involved in more than three hundred plots or violent incidents; of those, two hundred–plus occurred after 2015. Over roughly the same period, more than two thousand local newspapers either closed or merged; the number of local TV newsrooms also declined. As local journalism employment has fallen, gains in TV and digital newsrooms have been unable to make up for print losses. Threats from right-wing extremists can be high in populous counties, where local-news losses are acute; some attacks occur in rural counties that have gone without much local journalism for years. At crisis moments, when national reporters are tasked with covering communities struck by violence, there’s only so much they can learn by scouring online forums. “These movements have a slow creep,” Brandy Zadrozny, who covers extremism and disinformation for NBC News, said. “They often build on years of local grievances. Having reporters who can document with real understanding of a place and community is crucial.” In the months following the insurrection, law enforcement arrested more than five hundred people in forty-five states for their connection to the event. “If you don’t understand the place where something happens,” Chris Jones, who covers domestic extremism in Appalachia, said, “you’re preventing yourself from being able to understand why it happens.”
2005
2010
2020
Violent incidents 2016–2020: 221
Newspapers 8,930
Newspapers 6,736
Violent incidents 2010–2015: 93
Violent incidents 2005–2009: 36
2005
2010
2020
TK CREDIT
DATA
CJR
