Jeff Cole: Names will never hurt

A widely respected, even beloved colleague stands in the glare of klieg lights delivering her live report with Philadelphia’s City Hall looming in the background as she’s done many times before.

From off camera a series of quick pops are heard. She’s struck with plastic BBs or pellets from a replica firearm shot from a passing car. She flinches as she’s hit but quickly composes herself and continues her report flawlessly tossing back to the anchors as if it were all in a day’s work. It sometimes is.

A television news photographer with years of experience covering street crime, a grisly beat encompassing murders, shootings and assaults, is working his story outside a troubled funeral home when a man approaches trying to stop him. Suddenly, the guy swings at the camera, knocking it into his face, opening a bloody gash under his eye needing stitches to close.

Investigating claims a South Jersey politician is strong-arming business owners for campaign cash, the candidate, a big man the size of a defensive end, lashes out with violence when we sharply question him on the street. Our producer is pounded into a metal clothing donation box with his head and back striking it with a thud. I’m straight-armed as my microphone is stripped away while our news photographer, no small guy in his own right, must fight by wrestling on the pavement to protect his expensive gear. 

And then there are the threats. At nearly every television station I’ve worked in a nearly 50-year career, women reporting the news have been harassed, threatened, and even stalked by viewers. The threats are sometimes so persistent that female anchors must be escorted to and from work by security guards. At one former station, a man rushed the front door making his way to the newsroom before a reporter made a hallway tackle and hold until security arrived. Sadly, it’s not always skirmishes and threats.

In September of 2022, a suspect wearing a straw hat hiding his face was caught on security video slipping into the side yard of 69-year-old investigative reporter Jeffrey German. A long-time reporter for the Las Vegas Review Journal, German had exposed office bullying and an inappropriate office relationship by Robert Telles, a Las Vegas-area politician. Prosecutors alleged Telles stabbed German to death outside his home after his reporting led to Telles’s rejection at the polls.

“Journalists do not just die – they are killed.” That is the lead statement in a summary of the deaths of journalists in 2025 by Reporters Without Borders, known as RSF. The group reports, “the number of murdered journalists has risen again, due to the criminal practices of military groups – both regular and paramilitary – and organized crime.”  RSF finds, “…at least 53 of the 67 media professionals killed over the past year are victims of war or criminal networks.”  It cites Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and Mexico as the deadliest places on the planet for journalists. 

In the United States, most journalists work under a presumption of general safety. I know I did. Working as an investigative reporter, producing stories which sometimes led to arrests, prosecutions, job loss and certainly public embarrassment, the threats would arrive by phone, email and occasionally delivered straight to my face on the street at the end of a string of epithets by someone I’d questioned. While physical threats brought caution, they were never enough to stop the work for me or my colleagues. It’s why I find the recent disregard, disrespect and name calling of journalists so ridiculous.

As in every profession, reporters make mistakes. Simple stuff like misspelling a name, getting a date or the name of a community wrong. And there are serious mistakes: misinterpreting a complicated policy; being led to a conclusion by source with a clear agenda; getting an important fact wrong; even failing to make that last call for full context or response. I’m guilty. Many reporters are. 

The reporters I know and have worked with are not enemies of the people or stupid and certainly not piggies. They are the offspring of supportive middle or upper-middle income families, who dug deeply to send their young adults to college, and were supportive of their career paths even if they didn’t understand the business or were concerned they’d never earn enough to buy a home and start a family.  

They are people willing to move to small, distant cities to start their careers, reporting on the concerns of local folks along the way, before moving to a new community with unique issues as they advance. All this happening in a business undergoing massive change and job loss. Budgets are leaner as journalists must meet tighter deadlines while feeding social media and often shooting and editing their own video. 

No one I know, who is truly committed to the work, is complaining. They still see journalism as noble work, a gift granted and protected by the U.S. Constitution. They’d like more Americans to agree and know names will never hurt them.

Jeff Cole was an investigative, politics and policy reporter at Fox 29 in Philadelphia for 25 years. He is a two-time winner of the Weiss Award for Investigative Reporting, as well as the recipient of a series of Edward R. Murrow Awards and Associated Press Awards and four New England Emmy Awards for his investigative reporting.