In the hours after her newsroom became the latest setting for a mass shooting, San Felice appeared on CNN to predict that that the legs on the massacre that claimed five lives — Rob Hiaasen, Wendy Winters, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith and Gerald Fischman — were very short.
U.S. newsrooms fall silent to honor 5 slain at Maryland paper
The story would be in the news for about a week, San Felice told CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
It is no surprise the reporter who covered the Pulse nightclub shooting, while a student in Florida, was right.
We always move on in no time flat.
We moved on after Sandy Hook; the Las Vegas shooting; the San Bernadino attack; Stoneman Douglas High School; Columbine; the congressional baseball game; Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church …
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Perhaps we have short attention spans; don’t think there is an answer; have gotten used to it; didn’t notice; really don’t care; are too busy; have thrown our hands up in the air …
Time and time again, a debate involving mental health and gun access rises to the surface and then sinks back down to the ocean floor.
All the while, there is always another mass shooting in the wings. (Insert name of church, office, stadium, festival, city, school, movie theater, dance club or public street here.)
Like the 5-year-olds in Sandy Hook and the good Christians at Emanuel church, San Felice’s colleagues at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., didn’t see it coming.
How could they have?
Their accused murder had made threats in the past to the newsroom, but journalists have gotten threats long before we were painted as the enemy of the people.
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In the course of doing my job, I have been called a n*gger; a b*tch; a wh*re; a f*g lover; a liberal; stupid; fascist; ugly; fat; liar, a race traitor; fake news; a POS …
I have been threatened and lived in fear. I’ve worried about layoffs and watched great journalists lose their jobs. I’ve embraced new storytelling tools and watched society shift farther away from facts.
It is not easy being a journalist, and it never has been.
Despite it all, I love my job and know I contribute to society.
And like my journalism brothers and sisters who died at the Capital, the concert-goers, teenagers and the movie fans, I would never see it coming.
The fact is that you, I and/or someone we love could be a victim of the next mass shooting the nation talks about for a week before moving on.
Perhaps we have short attention spans; don’t think there is an answer; have gotten used to it; didn’t notice; really don’t care; are too busy; have thrown our hands up in the air …
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