A conservative reporter in Bangor, Maine was nearly run over by a driver while filming outside a clinic, and the institutional press that never stops preaching about journalism's sanctity has almost nothing to say about it.
Joe Sokol, a reporter for The Maine Wire, was confronted by a man in a dark blue vehicle outside a drug treatment clinic where he was filming a report, according to Newsweek. The man drove away — then moments later, an engine roared, and Sokol's camera hit the ground. The Maine Wire says it captured the whole incident on video and pledged to "take all necessary actions to demand justice." The Bangor Police Department is investigating, News Center Maine reported.
This is not an isolated incident. It's a pattern. HotAir documented the growing danger facing reporters who cover stories the left wants suppressed. Savanah Hernandez was assaulted by a couple on federal property in Minnesota; a federal grand jury later indicted both, and they face up to eight years in prison. Nick Shirley has been chased by knife-wielding attackers while filming overseas. The footage is always the same: a journalist doing the job, and somebody deciding violence is an acceptable answer.
The Maine Wire has made itself a target because it does the work other outlets won't touch. As HotAir noted, the outlet has "fearlessly chronicled the Chinese marijuana trade, the Graham Platner story, Janet Mills and the general disgrace that is Maine Democrats, and the Somali community's various ongoing scandals." Their reporters are regularly verbally abused and barred from public events that other media attend without issue. The Maine Wire always fights back. That refusal to back down makes them anathema to Maine's progressive power structure.
The rules are simple and every newsroom in America knows them. Violence against journalists is a five-alarm crisis — unless the journalist covers the wrong stories for the wrong outlet. Then it's not news. Then they probably had it coming. The same industry that spent years clutching its pearls over rhetoric from the Right cannot find space to report on a reporter nearly being run down in daylight. Newsweek covered it. Most didn't. The silence is the story.
Bangor police are investigating. Whether that investigation produces charges — or dissolves into the same institutional indifference that greeted the attack — will tell ordinary Americans everything they need to know about whose safety actually matters in this country.
