Journalists are not the enemy

We don’t like being the focus of the story. Our job, as we see it, is to act as impartial observers. At Straus News we don’t editorialize or endorse candidates for local or national elections because we want our news coverage to be as fair and balanced as possible. Given that our staffs are small, we don’t want the person writing the news story to write an opinion piece on the same topic.
And since we’re committed to reporting on the local issues that most impact our readers’ lives, we try not to whine about our business challenges -- newsprint tariffs and the like.
That said, we’re concerned about the President’s attacks on journalists. Even though we’re covering local issues – and not the President – we take personally his attacks on our work.
We aim to keep watch on government appointees, elected officials, school administrators – people in power in our community. We’re not liars and we’re not “the enemy.” We’re the people whose job it is to be curious and skeptical and ask a lot of questions.
There is an important difference between opinion journalism – talking heads on TV, editorial pages and what’s on the front page of, say, The Wall Street Journal. You may or may not agree with what The Wall Street Journal espouses on its editorial page but its news pages report the facts, as truthfully and accurately as possible.
The President does the country a great disservice by lumping together opinion journalism and news reporting -- and attacking the work we do every day. Calling NBC News the “enemy of the American people” is reprehensible.
Tensions between newspapers and presidents are not new. All presidents come to hate news coverage. Thomas Jefferson wrote his famous line about how important a free press was: “And 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” early in his career when he was Ambassador to France. Later, newspapers took a critical stance and Jefferson took a critical tone with them.
Early in Bill Clinton’s presidency, President Clinton reportedly complained to Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, then the publisher of The New York Times, about the paper’s editorials. Sulzberger told the president he thought of the editorials as “tough love.”
“Well, just don’t forget the love part,” the president was said to have replied.
A decade later, President George W. Bush summoned The New York Times top personnel to the Oval Office to try to prevent the paper from publishing an article about the National Security Agency’s monitoring of phone calls without court-approved warrants.
And closer to home, New York City Mayor Bill DiBlasio had police remove a New York Post reporter when he tried to ask the Mayor a question.
This moment feels different. The President’s constant barrage of attacks on the press feel dangerous. A free and democratic society needs independent watchdogs questioning those in power. In other words: honest, professional journalists reporting the facts.
The President seems to want to weaken the institution that’s supposed to question authority.
The Guardian of London wrote the following in a June editorial, after a Maryland newspaper’s offices were attacked:
“The plain task of finding out what is true and making it comprehensible and interesting is an honorable trade. Honest journalism is a vital part of any decent society. Fearless journalism is a sign, and a part of the defenses, of any free society. The trade can be grubby and – perish the thought – self-important but it gives us a warped mirror of our flawed selves and what we all learn from it is more important than the flaws. This is particularly true of local journalism because the local papers write about their readers and not about half-mythical celebrities. They help communities to recognize themselves in their common humanity and, at their best, can help them to come together....
"The real enmity lies not between the press and the people, but the free press (and people) and the powerful.”