On Christmas Eve, Donald Trump retweeted a doctored image of himself smiling on the phone with a bloodlike splatter on the underside of his shoe. Upon close inspection, the splatter revealed itself to be the CNN logo.

The following month, CNN headquarters received nearly two dozen threatening phone calls that began with talk of “fake news” and ended in threats of mass violence, according to federal documents.

The FBI traced the calls to Brandon Griesemer, a 19 year-old from Michigan who now faces federal criminal charges for threats to “gun down” the cable network’s employees at their Atlanta headquarters.

“Fake news. I’m coming to gun you all down,” he told a CNN operator. “I’m coming for you, CNN,” he said in a follow-up call. “Your cast is about to get gunned down in a matter of hours.”

What he said is now a matter of public record, thanks to an unsealed criminal complaint. But it shouldn’t take another FBI investigation to figure out where he got the language.

The president has repeatedly attacked the media, singling out CNN for its supposed “fake news” coverage of himself and his administration. Over the summer, he even went so far as to retweet edited footage of a wrestling match that showed him tackling a man with the CNN logo superimposed on his head outside the ring and throwing punches.

This comes amid mounting concern that Trump’s media attacks could culminate in actual violence against journalists.

Even before he was elected, Trump infamously kept reporters in pens at campaign trail events, insulting them outlandishly when they reported unflattering stories. As president he’s called for journalists’ jailing.

But his words are most dangerous in the hands of others, as senators in his own party argued last week in the wake of the president’s “Fake News Awards,” in which he promised to dole out prizes for “the most corrupt and dishonest” media.

Jeff Flake, in an impassioned speech to his colleagues on the Senate floor last week, put it this way: “Not only has the past year seen a president borrow despotic language to refer to the free press, but it seems that he has now in turn inspired authoritarians and dictators with his own language.”

Writing in an op-ed to the Washington Post, John McCain said: “The phrase ‘fake news’ – granted legitimacy by an American president – is being used by autocrats to silence reporters, undermine political opponents, stave off media scrutiny and mislead citizens.”

Already in the Philippines, dictator Rodrigo Duterte has begun lashing out at “fake news” for challenging his government. And the jailing of journalists is on the rise.

In 2017 the Committee To Protect Journalists cited 21 cases of journalists jailed on “fake news” charges, a record number. And a telling 87% of those jailed were covering politics.

But it isn’t just government actors who violently suppress the free press – in October, for instance, a prominent journalist was brutally murdered in Malta after reporting on government corruption.

And the revelation that violent discourse can have violent consequences in the wrong hands isn’t new.

Years after the Oklahoma City bombing, Bill Clinton, who was president at the time, would recall the role of violent rhetoric in the rightwing terror attack that killed 168 people.

“What we learned from Oklahoma City is not that we should gag each other or we should reduce our passion for the positions that we hold,” he said, “but the words we use really do matter, because there are – there’s this vast echo chamber, and they go across space, and they fall on the serious and the delirious alike. They fall on the connected and the unhinged alike.”

As Clinton reminds us, words – however ill-conceived and transparently self-serving – do matter. And violent threats against media aren’t a bug of Trump’s approach to the press. They’re a feature of it.

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