“It started late one day, and you could see it kind of building on social media,” Washington Post national editor Steven Ginsberg recalled of the torrent of online abuse directed last month at Seung Min Kim. The Post reporter had been photographed showing Senator Lisa Murkowski a critical tweet sent by Neera Tanden and seeking comment, a standard journalistic practice somehow interpreted as out of bounds or even unethical. The first thing Ginsberg and other Post editors did was reach out to Kim—“just to say: We’re here, we see it, we care, and how are you doing?” But the racist and sexist attacks only escalated, propelling Ginsberg to put out a statement to not only take a stand against harassment, but to try to move the ball forward by explaining why what Kim was doing was completely appropriate. “She and other minority women endure vile, baseless attacks on a daily basis, no matter what story they are working on or tweeting about,” he wrote. “The attacks on her journalistic integrity were wildly misguided and a bad faith effort at intimidation.” Ginsberg’s goal, he told me, was “to defend and educate.”

No journalist is above criticism. But what female journalists described to me goes beyond legitimate scrutiny of a headline or story framing and into their sex lives, their families, and other topics unrelated to their work, a wildly disproportionate level of pushback to any perceived journalistic offense. The old newsroom motto “don’t feed the trolls” seems increasingly quaint as top editors and media executives grapple with how and when to respond publicly to the deluge of smears filling a reporter’s inbox or chasing them across social media. “The environment for journalists is getting increasingly dangerous,” Ginsberg said. If not heralding a new era of how media organizations deal with attacks on female reporters, recent statements from the Post and The New York Times reflect the extent to which the problem has worsened, particularly for women on the male-dominated beats of politics and technology.

Earlier this month the Times issued a strongly worded defense of tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, whom Fox News’s Tucker Carlson sicced his followers on by bashing her on his prime-time program for, ironically, speaking out about how destructive the online harassment she’s experienced has been to her life and career over the past year. A week later the Times put out another statement—this time defending Rachel Abrams from “harassment” by One America News after the right-wing network urged viewers to contact the reporter over her upcoming “hit piece.” The statements were striking given that institutions like the Post and the Times don’t tend to acknowledge the toxic internet culture their reporters are constantly subject to. Speaking of the Lorenz incident, one reporter at the Times told me that she was glad the paper put out a statement “to show that the organization was identifying what was happening” and calling it out for what it was.

But the Times reporter, along with several other female journalists, said that overall, major media companies are not doing enough to support them, in part because a lot of news organizations believe the best way to deal with online abuse is to ignore it; journalists are coached to do the same. “What that ignores is the emotional toll that it takes on reporters, and the fact that it’s often a misunderstanding of our reporting” that warrants a response, the Times journalist said, noting that she’s seen false narratives about her work perpetuated because the paper’s social media policies keep her from commenting or engaging. Compounded with the lack of response from leadership, “you’re really just left with this feeling of being hung out to dry,” she told me. (The Times declined to make an editor available to discuss how the paper handles harassment of its reporters.)

“Even the most open-minded media organizations are still run by men who don’t fundamentally understand the misogynistic nature of these attacks,” said another reporter, among several who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of worsened harassment, as well as potential punishment by their employer for speaking out. “I really feel like there’s a space here for some male allies to step up and call this what it is,” the Times reporter told me, pointing to instances where there were multiple bylines on a story, and the only writer who got harassed or bullied online was the woman. This has especially been the case for women of color. Male and female reporters have also received asymmetrical responses after writing similar stories: Such was the case recently for Apoorva Mandavilli, a health and science reporter for the Times, who has spoken publicly about the experience.

Another reason media organizations may still be struggling with how to deal with this abuse is their failure to respond to the digital moment: So-called trolls no longer live only in the comment section at the bottom of an article or in hate mail. The nature of online abuse has evolved along with online media itself. “No media organization right now is prepared for this. Zero,” one reporter told me. “When you’re getting thousands of tweets and messages, and you’re being falsely attacked on TV and in articles, it’s imperative that you respond.”

A lack of institutional support has left women journalists to turn elsewhere: to a loose network of support that they have formed with one another. I’m told this occurs over group chats on Signal and WhatsApp, as well as on Slack channels and in Facebook groups. “It’s somewhere to scream into the void when you can’t respond on Twitter,” the Times reporter said. One journalist told me she’s in multiple groups, while another said she prefers to keep in touch with other women individually—in part out of distrust for sharing anything online, even in a support forum, after years of being targeted. Regardless, female journalists have found each other—some more publicly, through statements of solidarity on Twitter and after speaking out in interviews. “In some ways the people I am closest to after three years of this are people who I didn’t know at all before, and who were targeted by the same people,” journalist and researcher Hilary Sargent told me. 

Much of the day-to-day work of dealing with online harassment is also left to those enduring it. One journalist who has experienced this abuse said she spends a good chunk of her time just documenting it in an attempt to play defense, should she need to bring the evidence to a platform to prove that a user has been escalating their threats over time or repeatedly instigating doxxing campaigns. But that journalist and Sargent, another woman who spoke about the need for journalists to monitor and catalog the harassment in order to protect themselves, both pointed out the simultaneous trauma that comes from doing so. “Finding a group of people that you can trust to collect that information, but that’s not a group of people who are also dealing with it themselves, is really hard,” said Sargent, whose experience with harassment drove her to step back significantly from freelance writing. Sargent has had private information about herself and her family members posted by extremists on numerous platforms—and that’s just what she knows about. 

The proliferation of forms of online harassment over the years is also telling of how abuse, left unchallenged, can thrive. “The bad actors have been able to build and learn and strategize,” said Wagatwe Wanjuki, a writer and educator who last worked in journalism full-time in 2018. “They become more organized. They become more bold.” With victims, however, she said “there is still a very individualistic approach,” as media organizations tend to treat online harassment of women journalists as isolated incidents. “Institutional apathy is built on this notion that this is just the nature of being a woman or of being a woman of color in media,” Wanjuki noted, “and folks don’t feel compelled to go above and beyond to address that.” 

Ginsberg agreed that inaction on the part of media organizations may be one aspect of why things are getting worse. “Newsrooms are not standing up in the way that might make people think twice,” he said, which was part of his intention in issuing the statement about Kim. “I can choose to act or not act, and increasingly I feel like the choice has to be to act,” he told me, noting that there’s an effect beyond the statement itself in creating a hub for support and education. But he also admitted that the Kim situation was extremely clear-cut—she was obviously doing nothing wrong—in contrast to more tangled scenarios, which warrant no less public support from media organizations but may also require engaging with valid criticism. “Two things can happen at once. Someone can say something they shouldn’t have said that can be dealt with one way, but newsrooms still have to support the reporter in the face of the attacks that come after it.”

One reporter said that while a show of solidarity on Twitter or in a public statement from the media organization is appreciated, what she really needs help with is reputation management, fearing having to discuss false claims spread about her in future job interviews. “It’s not an equal and opposite reaction. It is so clearly about power, and power over women,” said Sargent, who also noted: “Getting threats like that, you may get some sort of friendly thoughts and prayers from people sympathetic to your plight, but you certainly aren’t getting job offers.” Two reporters posited that once you become a target, there’s an extent to which you’re looked at as drama, with one noting she had a media appearance canceled hours before she was set to record, essentially because they didn’t want to be associated with her after the trolling.  

“What makes me sad about a lot of this is that there should be space for criticism and engagement on stories,” the Times journalist told me, recalling when such a space existed in the early days of Twitter. “You could hear real criticism of an article and it would make you better as a reporter, because there were ideas and viewpoints that you should be thinking about and could incorporate into your next story.” Now, however, a good faith discussion with differing viewpoints is rare on the platform. In fact, she said thoughtful responses now come to her mostly via email. “Where I used to be afraid to open my email and see a torrent of things, now I’m afraid to open Twitter.”

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