White House Won’t Order Flags At Half-Staff To Honor Annapolis Newspaper Staff – By Scott Neuman (npr.com) / July 3 2018
A makeshift memorial is seen at the scene outside the office building housing The Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Md., on Sunday.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
After recent mass shootings at high schools in Texas and Florida, President Trump ordered American flags across the country lowered to half-staff to honor the victims. He did the same after killing sprees in Las Vegas and in Sutherland Springs, Texas.
However, the city of Annapolis confirmed to NPR that the president has declined a request for a similar show of respect for four journalists and a newspaper sales representative killed by a gunman last week at The Capital.
“Obviously, I’m disappointed, you know? … Is there a cutoff for tragedy?” Annapolis Mayor Gavin Buckley wondered aloud after he says the White House said no to his request that the slain newspaper staff be so honored.
“This was an attack on the press. It was an attack on freedom of speech. It’s just as important as any other tragedy,” Buckley said, according to The Baltimore Sun.
Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan ordered the state flag flown at half-staff on Friday through sunset on Monday.
But Buckley, a Democrat, tells the Sun that the scope of the tragedy at the city’s newspaper merited more than that.
“It’s not as noticeable when a state flag is down but you still have your main flags at full mast,” he said.
Buckley said he had thought of ordering American flags in Annapolis lowered, but that his wife talked him out of concern that it would “polarize people,” he said.
The White House could not immediately be reached for comment.
The president has said Thursday’s killings at the newspaper “shocked the conscience of our nation and filled our hearts with grief,” and said that “Journalists, like all Americans, should be free from the fear of being violently attacked while doing their job.”
However, since well before taking office, Trump has been openly antagonistic toward the press, calling it the “enemy of the American people” and frequently accusing the mainstream media of engaging in “fake news.”
Why was the FBI giving so much information to the Fake News Media. They are not supposed to be doing that, and knowing the enemy of the people Fake News, they put their own spin on it – truth doesn’t matter to them!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 18, 2018
While some have accused Trump of fostering a climate of disrespect and even violence toward the Fourth Estate, others note that his is a dilemma faced by all presidents.
The mass shootings in Las Vegas killed 58 people. At a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, 26 were killed. At the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., 17 died and at a high school and at Santa Fe High School in Texas, 10 were killed. By comparison, the shootings at the Annapolis newspaper killed 5.
USA Today writes, “like his predecessors, Trump also faces a grim calculus: What differentiates a devastating crime from a truly national tragedy? Is it a matter of body count, or do some attacks carry with them a symbolic significance that transcends the police report?”
Even so, Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston professor who studies presidential proclamations, tells USA Today that the Maryland shooting transcends the number killed because “the crucial role of the free press in America puts their status on par with any other government official.”
“This is a missed opportunity to make a truce with the press,” Rottinghaus said of the president. “To not lower the flag unfortunately says a lot about the president’s view of the members of the media.”
Some have also pointed out that President Obama also faced criticism in 2015 for failing to quickly issue a proclamation that the flag be flown at half-staff for five U.S. service members who were killed by a gunman at a naval reserve center in Chattanooga, Tenn. Obama did eventually make such an order, five days after the killings.
