Final-Fan said:
Here's the thing: the incident I described illustrates that among some (not all) Trump supporters there has developed a culture that "the media" is evil and they deserve whatever they get. They literally praised the fact that the man they were in the process of electing to Congress physically attacked a reporter for the crime of asking a question about his policy position on the new health care bill. I'm not going to say that our country has never seen politics get this bad before. It was extremely nasty in the mid-1800s, for example. But I think we are in a period of time when things are getting worse in that area, and I think we need to fight against that trend.
You're right that whistleblowers and people doing investigative journalism have always been attacked, verbally, politically, physically, etc. by the people they are exposing or accusing or by their allies. But it's a different situation entirely when there's a cultural indifference to whether people should be allowed to exercise their right to speak freely, question government officials, etc. without being beaten up or jailed. That's a bad path to go down for this country. You can see around the world places where that happens.
As a last point, you have a good argument if you say, "Because we don't have enough data on the question of whether death threats to media reporters are rising, you can't say your position is correct: we don't know." But that's a completely different thing from saying, "Because we don't know, my position that death threats are not rising must be accepted as the default position." That is wrong. [edit: And maybe you were never trying to say that, but I just needed to put that out there.] "We don't know" means "we don't know". I would argue that there is circumstantial evidence that makes it a lot more likely that it's rising than that it's not rising, but I would agree that based on the information presented in this thread it's not "beyond a reasonable doubt". I think there's been a lot more evidence here on my side, even if it's circumstantial, than you have presented for your side. Even if we don't know, that doesn't mean all possibilities are equally likely.
P.S. Please remember that the question of "death threats rising?" is different from, although related to, the question of "public acceptance of repression of free speech & freedom of media inquiry rising?"
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