Fox News regular and Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields was manhandled by Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, Tuesday night after she asked a question he didn’t like. Possibly even worse is that her employer seems to be giving him a pass.

From Politico:

Fields was attempting to ask Trump a question as he exited the press conference. Secret Service was starting to clear a path, when Fields was forcibly grabbed on her arm by Lewandowski, moving her out of the way and nearly bringing her down to the ground, a source who witnessed the situation told POLITICO.

Fields was clearly roughed up by the move, the witness said.

The Daily Beast wrote that Fields “was sporting a purple bruise as a result of the encounter” and “was shocked and shaken, barely managing to keep her footing as Lewandowski and the Trump scrum headed out the doors, according to colleagues.”

It’s ironic, given that Breitbart is so friendly to Trump that  it has been nicknamed “Trumpbart” and is “widely seen as a credulous purveyor of Trump’s angry populist, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim message, and as an enthusiastic booster of the reality show billionaire’s candidacy,” according to The Daily Beast.

But, apparently, Fields was acting a little too much like a real reporter and the Trump campaign didn’t recognize she was one of their own. As The Daily Beast reported yesterday, Lewandowski’s explanation “was that he and Fields had never met before and that he didn’t recognize her as a Breitbart reporter, instead mistaking her for an adversarial member of the mainstream media.”

Just as awful, Breitbart has publicly signaled that it’s not fully behind Fields. Also from the March 9 Daily Beast article:

“It’s obviously unacceptable that someone crossed a line and made physical contact with our reporter,” said the Breitbart statement, issued under the name of Larry Solov, the outlet’s CEO and president. “What Michelle has told us directly is that someone ‘grabbed her arm’ and while she did not see who it was, Ben Terris of The Washington Post told her that it was Corey Lewandowski. If that’s the case, Corey owes Michelle an immediate apology.”

…The Breitbart statement struck sources within Breitbart and outside the company as strangely inadequate, given that it blames an unidentified “someone,” uses the conditional phrase “if that’s the case,” and leaves open the possibility that Lewandowski didn’t lay hands on Fields.

Furthermore, Breitbart’s PR consultant reportedly told Fields to have her boyfriend, The Daily Caller's Jamie Weinstein, to stop tweeting his outrage.

I’m no fan of Fields. But no campaign has any business roughing up a member of the press trying to cover a presidential candidate at a public event.

Fields, a former Fox News contributor, still appears regularly on Cashin’ In. Yet I found nothing on FoxNews.com about the incident.

I did find plenty of conservative outrage aggregated on the conservative Twitchy, including two righteous tweets from Todd Starnes:

While those are somewhat comforting, some of the comments on the Twitchy thread are full of hateful accusations toward Fields. They accuse her of making it up in order to help Ted Cruz, exaggerating the encounter, being a liberal and all but asking for it because she didn’t get out of the way when Trump and the Secret Service were passing by her.

This is just the latest in a string of incidents of hostility and violence toward journalists at Trump events.

This is serious and it matters.

Caricature of Donald Trump by DonkeyHotey via Creative Commons license.