The president, the mayor, fake news, and your local paper

The necessity of a trusted free press to the health of American democracy has been undisputed since the founding of our republic — until now.

In recent weeks, the journalists of our free press have been slandered as “Enemies of the People” — not by a foreign power or fringe group, but by the President of the United States, the nation’s highest officer sworn to protect the Constitution enshrining the First Amendment rights those journalists exercise daily for the benefit of us all.

But President Trump’s casual use of this Stalinist epithet is only the most egregious example of a years-long campaign to destroy public trust in the news media and erode the ability of the Fourth Estate to hold our government and politicians accountable. The President routinely denounces factual reporting as “fake news” while trumpeting media outlets pushing propaganda, conspiracy theories, and outright lies as legitimate reporting. In short, the role of America’s free press is under attack — and with it, our nation’s founding values.

Without a free press that is justly trusted as a source of impartial truth, politicians and special interests have unchecked rein to lie, dissemble, and manipulate reality with impunity. Without journalists who are free to question public officials and demand information on government actions, the institutions that are supposed to protect and serve us cannot be trusted to do either. Without political leaders who respect the value of our free press to the American way of life, the world’s first constitutional democracy fails in its historic role as a beacon of freedom to all of humanity.

Trump is by no means alone, however, in the systematic attack on the role of the free press. On Aug. 12, Mayor DeBlasio had a New York Post reporter hauled away by police after he asked the mayor for comment on the paper’s recent story on the many meetings he and his top aides have had with lobbyists — meetings that DeBlasio had pledged as a candidate to disclose on a monthly basis, but only recently began revealing after four years in office, and only because of relentless pressure from the news media.

The work our reporters do in the neighborhoods we cover is as important as reporters taking leaders to task in City Hall and Washington, D.C. — and our reporters have been subjected to similar attacks, as well.

Last November, Julianne Cuba accurately reported that Community Board 18 district manager Dottie Turano had quietly filed a budget request asking the city to look at up-zoning Marine Park, and when faced with intense public blowback following the revelation, Turano denounced Cuba’s factual reporting as “fake news,” despite being unable to cite any actual error. Disdain for the free press has leached down from the very pinnacle of our government to even its most grass-roots level.

Editors and reporters across the country are standing together this week to denounce the attacks demonizing our profession and seeking to sabotage our ability to hold the people in power accountable for their actions.

And we ask you, the readers we work for, to stand with us.

Defending our free press from attacks by politicians and special interests should be a cause that rises above party, ideology, race, or any of the other fault lines along which some are seeking to divide our country. It goes to the heart of what America stands for, and is vital to the survival of government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

As women’s rights pioneer and investigative journalist Ida B. Wells wrote in 1892: “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.”

Jennifer Goodstein

President and Publisher, Community News Group,
NYC Community Media

Les Goodstein

CEO, Community News Group, NYC Community Media

Lincoln Anderson

Editor, The Villager

Vince DiMiceli

Editor-in-chief

Brooklyn Paper

Courier Life Publications

Bill Egbert

Editor, Downtown Express