To his everlasting shame, Donald Trump has attacked the press as enemies of the people. He is wrong. A Democracy cannot exist without a free and unfettered press. The people must know what is happening in their government, whether good or bad, because in the final analysis they make the decisions on who will govern and how they will govern.
Yesterday, at the urging of The Boston Globe, over 200 newspapers fought back with editorials on the importance of a free press to this country. Here is what the New York Times wrote:
In 1787, the year the Constitution was adopted, Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to a friend, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
That’s how he felt before he became president, anyway. Twenty years later, after enduring the oversight of the press from inside the White House, he was less sure of its value. “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper,” he wrote. “Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.”
Jefferson’s discomfort was, and remains, understandable. Reporting the news in an open society is an enterprise laced with conflict. His discomfort also illustrates the need for the right he helped enshrine. As the founders believed from their own experience, a well-informed public is best equipped to root out corruption and, over the long haul, promote liberty and justice.
“Public discussion is a political duty,” the Supreme Court said in 1964. That discussion must be “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” and “may well include vehement, caustic and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”
In 2018, some of the most damaging attacks are coming from government officials. Criticizing the news media — for underplaying or overplaying stories, for getting something wrong — is entirely right. News reporters and editors are human, and make mistakes. Correcting them is core to our job. But insisting that truths you don’t like are “fake news” is dangerous to the lifeblood of democracy. And calling journalists the “enemy of the people” is dangerous, period.
These attacks on the press are particularly threatening to journalists in nations with a less secure rule of law and to smaller publications in the United States, already buffeted by the industry’s economic crisis. And yet the journalists at those papers continue to do the hard work of asking questions and telling the stories that you otherwise wouldn’t hear. Consider The San Luis Obispo Tribune, which wrote about the death of a jail inmate who was restrained for 46 hours. The account forced the county to change how it treats mentally ill prisoners.
Answering a call last week from The Boston Globe, The Times is joining hundreds of newspapers, from large metro-area dailies to small local weeklies, to remind readers of the value of America’s free press. These editorials, some of which we’ve excerpted, together affirm a fundamental American institution.
If you haven’t already, please subscribe to your local papers. Praise them when you think they’ve done a good job and criticize them when you think they could do better. We’re all in this together.
The Austin American Statesman:
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have long decried unfavorable press coverage as erroneous or incomplete, seeking to blunt the impact of reporting that holds those in power accountable.
President Donald Trump, however, has taken that tactic to the extreme, labeling stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” and branding journalists as “the enemy of the people” — both dangerous distortions designed to untether the administration from inconvenient facts.
Journalists play an essential role in informing voters and holding leaders accountable, a function enshrined in the Constitution as part of the checks and balances that keep our democracy healthy. We stand in solidarity today with the editorial boards of hundreds of U.S. newspapers defending the rigorous, truth-driven work by journalists and opposing Trump’s cynical efforts to dismiss that reporting as “fake news.”
In our business, we know how much words matter. We know, too, that Trump’s references to us as the “enemy of the American People” are no less dangerous because they happen to be strategic. That is what Nazis called Jews. It’s how Joseph Stalin’s critics were marked for execution.
Every reporter who has ever covered a Trump rally knows the scratch of a threat that’s conveyed during that ritual moment when he aims the attention of the crowd to reporters, many of whom no longer stand in the press pen in the back for that reason.
And as real as the threat of physical violence is, especially after the murder of our colleagues in Annapolis, Maryland, Trump’s aggressive posture toward the First Amendment worries us even more.
That’s why we’re joining with fellow journalists across the country in calling for an end to the president’s war of words against our free press.
The Dallas Morning News:
Trump is, of course, not the first U.S. president to voice his grievances with the media. Presidents from John Adams to Richard Nixon to Barack Obama often scuffled with the press corps.
But in our modern era, no president has as publicly or fundamentally challenged the legitimacy of America’s leading news organizations as the current occupant of the Oval Office. The crucial difference is that rather than taking issue with one story or even a series of stories, the intention seems to be to undermine the credibility of the press as a whole with a large swath of the citizenry.
We see this as dangerous for the simple reason that by diminishing the press, those who hold high office gain a greater ability to govern without the steadying force of public scrutiny. That’s a recipe not for empowering this president, but rather for ensuring that our leaders in Washington fall out of touch with the people and decide that they know better than the people they seek to govern.
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