© Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesVideos from President Donald Trump's Make America Great Again Rally in Florida on July 31 captured Trump supporters yelling and chanting at journalists and trying to disrupt a live shot by CNN’s Jim Acosta.
TV networks are employing security guards at the president's high-octane rallies.Notebooks, mics, cameras, hairspray - those are all things TV reporters are used to having with them at political rallies. Now, in the age of President Donald Trump, they've added another: security guards.
The networks are employing them, according to reporters, at Trump's high-octane political rallies,
where the media often serves as the No. 1 rhetorical punching bag.Last weekend, NBC News White House correspondent Geoff Bennett posted a picture on Instagram of himself with a member of the NBC security detail at Trump's Ohio rally, commenting, "We need security guards when covering rallies hosted by the President of the United States. Let that sink in." Meanwhile, ABC News reporter Tara Palmeri
tweeted and
wrote about covering the Ohio rally, "for the first time with a bodyguard."
Networks deployed security at Trump events as far back as the 2016 campaign. But in the wake of the
shooting in the Capital Gazette newsroom in Annapolis, Maryland, and with the president ramping up both his rally schedule and his rhetoric against the media - he has tweeted that reporters are the "enemy of the people" five times in the past month, while he'd used the line just twice on Twitter before that - news outlets now find themselves increasingly facing the question of whether they're doing enough to keep journalists safe.
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