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Friday, March 29, 2024

Never the enemy

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Some 350 newspapers across the United States ran editorials Thursday reacting to President Donald Trump’s continued assault on the press.

The newspapers heeded the call of The Boston Globe, which called for “urgent action by those committed to free speech and the free press to stand against a White House and its allies who are bent on eroding a pillar of an informed democracy.”

Classifying journalists not as fellow Americans but as an enemy of the people has dangerous consequences, according to The Globe. Doing so sends an alarming signal to despots all over the world that journalists can be treated as a domestic enemy.

“It is an essential endpoint to Trump’s deluge of dishonesty that he now contests objective reality and urges his supporters to do the same.”

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The Philadelphia Inquirer is the first to acknowledge that the media are not beyond criticism. It is part of healthy debate, and sometimes new organizations earn the criticism. “But demonization of the press is now a calculated White House strategy.”

What the strategy threatens is people’s ability to make up their mind, which is made possible by information.

The New York Times also says criticism is par for the course. “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.”

That is starkly different, however, from branding truths one does not like as “fake news.”

Guess who the first person is to have a low regard for the truth. According to The Washington Post, Trump made 4,229 false or misleading statements in the first 558 days of his presidency.

The Baltimore Sun is determined to push back “against this president’s —any president’s—abuses of power. Because that’s what we’re here to do. Our democracy depends on it.”

This is all in the context of Donald Trump’s pronouncements on the media, but it could be instructive to all other societies grappling with how truth should be presented and how those who dare speak it, or challenge those in authority, must be dealt with.

Here in the Philippines, for instance, we harbor no illusions that media is truly free. Journalists can still speak their minds and report on what is truly happening—but often these come with tradeoffs. Sometimes those who dare are immediately branded as acting on behalf of rival groups. Sometimes, political or business ties of the news organizations that employ them also make journalists rethink how they are supposed to write about certain issues.

The nobility of the profession is always tempered by the realities, often harsh, that surround those who practice it. Being a journalist in challenging times is good, because aside from using the skills learned in school and over time, one is forced to evaluate what things can be compromised—and what cannot.

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