Women Journalists Still Experience Online Harassment

Online trolling, harassment, and hate campaigns targeting female journalists persist all over the world, according to a recent report issued by the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). While all journalists are at risk of online abuse, female journalists uniquely face “gender trolling,” or online violence and sexual harassment that may include death threats, rape threats, and credible, detailed descriptions of violence.

According to the ICFJ research, 73% of female journalists surveyed experienced online violence, with 25% of the messages they received threatening physical violence and 18% threatening sexual violence. What’s more, 20% of victims were physically attacked or abused in the offline world in connection with online violence they had experienced.

“Networked misogyny and gaslighting intersect with racism, religious bigotry, homophobia and other forms of discrimination to threaten women journalists — severely and disproportionately,” according to the report. “Threats of sexual violence and murder are frequent and sometimes extended to their families. … They are also increasingly spilling offline, sometimes with devastating consequences.”

“The last two years, I have lived every week of my life getting abused and then getting death threats,” Patricia Devlin, a journalist from Northern Ireland interviewed for the study, said. She reported that the police once came to her home to warn her that she was at risk of being murdered within 48 hours. “[You] just start to say to yourself, is this ever going to end?... I can't do my job without being on social media, so I can't come off social media.”

Investigative journalist Brandy Zadrozny, who covers disinformation for NBC News and MSNBC and has reported on far-right networks, the QAnon conspiracy, and the anti-vaccine movement, told the authors of the report, “I’m not in a war zone, I’m behind a computer. But the effect of online harassment and bad faith journalism from disinformation agents... is meant to silence us, meant to stop our reporting, meant to scare us. I think it does all of those things… And that takes a real toll on you. ”

Of course, evidence of gendered harassment of reporters has been covered beyond the confines of this report. Pakistani journalist Gharidah Farooqi has endured nine years of online abuse for reporting on Pakistani politicians and national news, and recently told the Washington Post that she’s been harassed, stalked, and threatened with rape and murder. “Men are really obsessed with if a woman journalist is single or if she’s married, and if she’s married, what’s the status of her marriage, and if she’s divorced, then what’s the reason, and if she’s single, then it’s a crime,” she said. “In the field of journalism, you can’t be a single woman; you’re suspected with all kinds of nasty ideas. If she’s still single, that means she’s having multiple affairs.”

One particularly egregious example of harassment occurred in 2021, when Fox News host Tucker Carlson chose to target then-New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz on his program. On his widely viewed program, Carlson insulted and diminished Lorenz’s journalistic credentials and infantilized her, then continued attacking Lorenz the following evening on his program.

After the second night of attacks, The New York Times issued a statement supporting Lorenz, but it did little to protect Lorenz from becoming the center of a massive and lasting hate storm. In an April 1, 2022 interview with MSNBC, Lorenz broke down as she described the relentless online violence she faced. “They’ll threaten children, they’ll threaten my parents. I’ve had to remove every single social tie. I have severe PTSD from this,” she said. “I contemplated suicide and got really bad. You feel like any little piece of information that gets out on you will be used by the worst people on the internet to destroy your life, and it’s so isolating.”

Gendered online harassment has a clear goal: to induce fear, belittle, humiliate, and shame the targets, as well as silence and discredit them professionally. In addition to being morally reprehensible, this treatment silences women journalists at a time when we need their perspectives and grit the most. Take, for example, women’s coverage of many news events in the past year alone. According to the Coalition For Women In Journalism’s Annual Press Freedom Review, “women were the first journalists to report on the war in Ukraine. Despite the danger to themselves, women remained in Afghanistan to document and expose the injustices imposed upon the Afghan people by the Taliban. It was women who risked everything to amplify the cries of their sisters in Iran, while the rest of the world looked away.”