ABOUT THIS BOOK

In Deadline: 200 Years of Violence against Journalists in the United States, Elizabeth Atwood offers the first comprehensive look at the history of fatal attacks against journalists in the United States between 1829 and the present. Atwood describes the political, technological, and economic context of these assaults, and includes brief biographies of the victims and accounts of what happened both them and to their assailants after the attacks.

To help us understand these attacks, Atwood presents a framework for categorizing them, built on John Nerone’s studies on assaults on American media workers. Atwood categorizes attacks against journalists as attacks against individuals, ideas, and media institutions, and undertaken to suppress reporting on certain topics and in the context of wars and other international or conflicts. Crucially, Deadline utilizes this framework to offer possible solutions to the issue of violence against journalists.

Atwood was inspired to explore the pressing issue of violence against American journalists after the tragic death of one of her colleagues at the Baltimore Sun, Rob Hiaasen, in the Capital Gazette shooting in 2018. Throughout, she demonstrates that distrust of the media and violence against the press in the United States are hardly new developments. Her work examines how intimidation, violence, and censorship have, in fact, been used against the American press since both its and the nation’s founding.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Elizabeth Atwood spent nearly thirty years as a newspaper reporter and editor, including twenty-two years at the Baltimore Sun. Her first book, Marguerite Harrison, America’s First Female Foreign Intelligent Agent, was published by Naval Institute Press in 2020. Currently, Atwood is Associate Professor of journalism at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where her research focuses on the relationship between the news media and political and social revolutions. Her research into fatal assaults on journalists in the United States was awarded first place prize for a faculty paper in the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2021. The paper was published in Journalism History in 2023. She also has written articles for the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, American Journalism, and Newspaper Research Journal. She holds a master’s degree in history from the University of Virginia and a Ph.D. in public communication from the University of Maryland, where her doctoral dissertation examined the operations of four Moscow newspapers following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

REVIEWS

“Elizabeth Atwood has done an amazing job chronicling the deaths of more than 78 American journalists killed while exercising their rights and protecting democracy. Through her exhaustive work, we learn that silencing journalists is not new but certainly just as real today as it was in the 18th century. This is a must read for anyone interested in preserving freedom of speech.” —Tom Marquardt, author of Pressed to Kill: Inside Newspapers' Worst Mass Murder

“In Deadline, Liz Atwood has chronicled in vivid detail the lives and times of 81 journalists whose violent deaths occurred because of their work. In scrutinizing cases ranging from the 19th-century Kentucky editor who died rather than reveal a confidential source to two editors killed in the 1910 union bombing of the Los Angeles Times building to the author’s friend and colleague, who was shot to death just seven years ago in his Annapolis newsroom, Atwood analyzes the root causes of the violence and offers some valuable solutions for the future.” —Bill Marimow, president of the Fund for Investigative Journalism

“The deadliest attack on journalists in U.S. history took place not in the early days of the country’s founding but in the 21st century at a community newspaper in Annapolis, MD. As Elizabeth Atwood recounts in her comprehensive analysis, journalists have been killed in the United States throughout the country’s 250-year history. They were targeted for their opinions and their ideas, for reporting on conflict and corruption and even just because of their profession. Atwood’s engaging and thorough profiles of fallen journalists place their deaths in historic context and vividly illustrate the dangers they face while pursuing news and defending freedom of the press.” —Barbara Cochran, Missouri School of Journalism, president of the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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