A Free Press Needs You

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 16, 2018 at 5:23:31 PM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] A Free Press Needs You
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> A Free Press Needs You
> By NYT Editorial Board
> Aug 15 2018
> <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/15/opinion/editorials/free-press-local-journalism-news-donald-trump.html>
>
> 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.
>
> [snip]
>
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