THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING: I believe Trump got much wrong about the First Amendment. As yes, he would often (not without reason) unleash his Master Troll skills on the White House Press corps, who I’ve likened to cats chasing a laser pointer.

That said, for four years we heard a drumbeat from media critics, news organizations and inside-the-bubble DC types about how Trump — and conservatives in general — are a threat to the physical safety of reporters. Remember when heads rolled at The New York Times after they (gasp!) published an Op/Ed written by conservative Senator Tom Cotton that according to Times reporters, “puts Black @NYTimes staff in danger”? Oh yes:

Nikole Hannah-Jones, who recently won a Pulitzer prize for the 1619 Project, which examines the legacy of slavery in America, tweeted: “I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this.”

Both Sulzberger and Bennet first defended the decision to run the column. Bennet wrote in an essay that “debating influential ideas openly, rather than letting them go unchallenged, is far more likely to help society reach the right answers.”

But on Thursday evening, the Times reversed itself and said the column had not met editorial standards.

Allow me to do a “whattabout” here. Allegedly sincere and intelligent adults flipped out over “allowing” their readers to see an opinion that — in only the most concatenated and gymnastic logic — could lead to a reporter being harmed.

Yet, when a genuine — not imaginary — physical assault on a journalist happens, there is no hue and cry, not a word from the Committee to Protect Journalists nor their empty-vessel mouthpiece Christiane Amanpour. Not a peep from Jim Acosta or Margaret Sullivan or Brian Stelter. Of course, the reporter (a woman, no less) identifies as a conservative:

Two men were busted for rubbing a dirty diaper on an independent, conservative reporter’s face and attacking her during a Black Lives Matter rally in Madison Square Park last month, according to authorities and police sources.

The New York Post adds that a video clip shows her being hit with an umbrella, spat on, hit with a skateboard, while the crowd says, ‘Don’t protect [her], she’s for Trump.”

Glad the NYPD caught the assailants, but the hypocrisy of the people who claim to care about protecting reporters is disappointing at best. You can bet your bottom dollar that were she a freelancer for NPR or The Daily Koz (same thing, I know, I know) we’d have heard more outrage.

Seems to me that the silence of journalism’s would-be “defenders” is pretty much saying “She deserved it for being a conservative.”