Letter from a journalist

Rachel Leingang, The Guardian -    I attended my first White House correspondents’ dinner last month, and I admit I felt like a fish out of water. I’ve covered politics my whole career, but always from outside Washington – Arizona for many years, and now Minnesota. The thought of dressing up to eat lobster with a president whose attacks on the press are sustained and escalating was anathema to me.

But my Guardian colleagues didn’t attend the dinner to celebrate: our editor-in-chief declined the invitation, and instead sent four of us reporters to cover the event for our readers. We also went to show our immunity to intimidation: the guests we invited to our table were press freedom advocates, including a journalist I’ve interviewed from here in Minnesota who is being charged by the Trump administration.

We were finishing our salads when I noticed people start ducking under the tables. There was yelling I couldn’t quite hear – “stay down” or “shots fired” perhaps – but it was clearly gun-related. I climbed under the table too, texted my husband that I might be going through a shooting, and waited.

Looking back, what was most jarring was how I felt both very scared about what was happening but also not particularly surprised. Violence is foundational to America. And professionally, I’ve been around so much of it in the past year.

I’m a politics reporter, but living in a suburb of Minneapolis, what I have spent much of my year doing is reporting on political violence. I was out with groups that were on ICE watch as Renee Good was shot. I got there right as the police line went up. I saw the pepper balls from federal agents and heard the screams from everyone who turned up in the streets, yelling that ICE agents were murderers.

But even before the ICE surge, a Democratic lawmaker and her husband were assassinated in the suburb next door to mine. I went to several vigils for that. Soon after, there was a school shooting at a local Catholic school. I went to vigils for that too.

I’m the Guardian’s US democracy reporter: I’m not equipped to be reporting from a warzone. But as I’ve discovered this year, there are very few places in America where it is safe to report on politics. I know that violence is a feature of American life, but our nation’s blasé attitude toward gun violence, and political violence, is something I refuse to adopt as my own. To me, that’s a ruinous position, both as a journalist and as a human. I am fighting tooth and nail to not be desensitized to the violence all around me, and I’m unwilling to accept it’s not changeable. I will keep my hope, and I will keep reporting.

After we were cleared to come out from under the ballroom tables at the White House correspondents’ dinner, the black-tie after-parties went ahead as planned. I didn’t go. I went straight back to my hotel and wrote my news story for our readers. The next day, I flew home to Minnesota, and hugged my family with relief.