Nearly 350 news organizations are set to publish editorials on Thursday pushing back against Donald Trump’s attacks on the media and defending freedom of the press.
The publications are participating in a push organized by the Boston Globe to run coordinated editorials denouncing what the paper called a ‘dirty war against the free press’.
(The Guardian US, August 15, 2018)
It occurred to me that I can do my small part by sharing this excerpt from “A Free Press Needs You” – The New York Times’s contribution to this coordinated push back:
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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. …
We’re all in this together.
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You can do your small part by expanding your consumption of news and current events beyond screaming, click-bait headlines on social media. Take a few minutes to read reports and commentaries from a variety of sources. And do not hesitate to check people when you hear them parroting the blatant lies and misleading statements President Trump and his enablers inject into the bloodstream of public debate every day.