Remember when Donald Trump called the media "the enemy of the people"? Well, that rhetoric now has an echo on the streets of the country.

Mass protests across the country against excessive violence and racial profiling by law enforcement have also seen the resurgence of a phenomenon common in countries with less democratic governments: police violence against the media.

In the wake of the death of George Floyd, a 47-year-old African-American man who lost consciousness under the knee of a white police officer in Minneapolis, street protests have escalated exponentially over the past few days, with a crushing police response.

According to a spokesman for the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, led by the Freedom of the Press Foundation, "at least 100 different incidents of attacks on the media" have been documented over the weekend alone.

These numbers increased as protest sites across the country grew.

During rallies outside the White House on Sunday, for example, MSNBC journalist Garrett Haake was hit by an alleged rubber bullet while reporting live. At the same location, a CNN photographer was beaten by a police officer with a club.

In New York City, Tyler Blint Welsh of the Wall Street Journal used Twitter to report how riot police had hit his face several times and pushed him to the ground.

"I'm just sitting here crying," he wrote. "This sucks."

Similarly, KPCC radio reporter Adolpho Guzman-Lopez showed a rubber bullet wound in his throat on Twitter.

"I had just interviewed a man with my phone at 3rd and Pine, and a cop pointed a gun at me and shot me in the throat.”

At a time when nothing escapes the cameras of social networks, police violence has taken a front-row seat.

Ali Velshi of MSNBC, Leland Vittert of Fox News, and Omar Jimenez of CNN have all been victims in one way or another of the same evil that protesters reject on the streets: violence and institutionalized racism.

Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, cited the number of reports of journalists being attacked by law enforcement in a news release.

“The numerous, targeted attacks that journalists reporting on protests across the country have faced from law enforcement over the last two nights are both reprehensible and clear violations of the First Amendment,” he said. “These attacks not only endanger our free press, but also threaten our democracy and the essential role that journalists play in safeguarding constitutional rights.

He added, “Many of these attacks were captured on live broadcasts. The video evidence showing journalists under police assault simply for doing their jobs is harrowing. We strongly condemn these actions and will be contacting law enforcement in each jurisdiction to demand a full explanation and accountability for officers who knowingly targeted journalists.”

He also condemned the attacks on journalists by protesters. “Assaults on journalists from protesters are unlawful and make it harder for reporters to keep the country informed during this period of civil unrest,” he said.

For journalists like Molly Hennessy-Fiske, these attacks are something radically new to the profession.

“I’ve covered protests involving police in Ferguson, Mo., Baton Rouge, La., Dallas, and Los Angeles. I’ve also covered the U.S. military in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan. I have never been fired at by police until tonight,” she wrote on Twitter, after being attacked along with other reporters and photographers in Minneapolis.

“The Minnesota State Patrol was advancing on protesters and us. We identified ourselves as press and they fired tear gas canisters on us at point-blank range,” Hennessy-Fiske said in a Twitter video, adding that she got hit in the leg and had to scale a brick wall in order to take shelter. “I was saying, ‘Where do we go? Where do we go?’ They did not tell us where to go, they did not direct us, they just fired on us.”

Journalists like Linda Tirado, a photographer, and independent activist, were seriously injured. Tirado was blinded after she was hit in the eye with a nonlethal round while covering unrest in Minneapolis, The Guardian reported.

Meanwhile, the president continued to write on Twitter that networks like CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times and the Washington Post were sources of "disinformation.”

"Fake news is the enemy of the people!"

The terrible images of people vandalizing CNN's Atlanta headquarters on Friday were an ominous picture of what hate speech reaps from political leaders around the country.

And while talk of demagoguery against journalism in the country goes back to the Nixon era, the Trump presidency has made it a thousand times worse.

“By denigrating journalists so often, he has degraded respect for what journalists do and the crucial role they play in a democracy,” Suzanne Nossel, executive director of PEN America, a nonprofit free speech organization, told the Washington Post.

“He’s been remarkably effective in contributing to this topsy-turvy sense that journalists are the opposition,” she added.

For his part, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon, agreed saying: “Trump tapped into hostility that was already there, and he has piled on and made it worse.” 

“The president could have lowered the temperature by reminding people that journalists are essential to our democracy and deserve to be allowed to do their jobs,”  he said.