Newspapers across the country teamed up last week to send a message to President Donald J. Trump.
“This dirty war on the free press must end, …” the Boston Globe said in announcing the effort. “The Globe proposes to publish an editorial on Aug. 16 on the dangers of the administration’s assault on the press and ask others to commit to publishing their own editorials on the same date.”
And, of course, the president immediately read those editorials, realized his mistake and promised to call off the fight.
Just kidding.
“THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA IS THE OPPOSITION PARTY,” the president tweeted on the morning all of those editorials appeared. “It is very bad for our Great Country. ... BUT WE ARE WINNING!”
In a subsequent tweet, the president did, in his own way, acknowledge the importance of the Fourth Estate.
“There is nothing that I would want more for our Country than true FREEDOM OF THE PRESS,” he said. “The fact is that the Press is FREE to write and say anything it wants, but much of what it says is FAKE NEWS, pushing a political agenda or just plain trying to hurt people. HONESTY WINS!”
He seems to enjoy taunting journalists. Witness this tweet after a particularly nasty encounter between reporters and Trump supporters at a rally in Florida.
“The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it’s TRUE,” he said. “I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They
purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!”
Frankly, I’m not convinced the president believes that, but the sad reality is many of his supporters do.
Quinnipiac University asked survey respondents how they would characterize the news media. Given a choice between “the enemy of the people” and “an important part of democracy,” 51 percent of those identifying themselves as Republicans chose the president’s description.
A recent survey by Ipsos was even more troubling, finding that 43 percent of Republicans believed the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaging in “bad behavior.”
Think about that. More than 2 in 5 Republicans say the president should be able to shut down news organizations whose stories he doesn’t like.
And the issue isn’t limited to Republicans.
Even though 57 percent of respondents overall said they believed journalists played a necessary role in keeping the government honest, just 46 percent believed “most news outlets try their best to produce honest reporting.”
I’ve been in the news business for more than four decades, and I’ve never known a journalist who made up a news story. The journalists I know don’t lie. They don’t deal in fake news.
Still, many Americans see a president calling journalists really sick people, and they cheer.
Al Tompkins, senior faculty member at the Poynter Institute, is on the side of journalists. In a column written days before all those editorials were published, Tompkins called the president’s “enemy of the people” routine “unpresidential, unproductive and untrue.”
Still, he predicted the editorials defending a free press would have little effect.
“Trump backers will call journalists whiners, and journalists will counterattack,” he said. “Twitter and cable news will have a ball with it all. And Friday morning we will be right where we were this morning. Divided.”
To change that, he said, journalists need to sit down with their critics and truly listen to what those critics have to say.
And then they need to act on what they learn.