Newspapers across the nation, including the Daily Hampshire Gazette, are challenging the president’s characterization of the press as “the enemy of the people” in a series of coordinated newspaper editorials published Thursday.
The Boston Globe invited newspapers across the country to stand up for the press and denounce President Donald Trump’s “dirty war against the free press” with editorials on Thursday, and several began appearing online a day earlier. Nearly 350 news organizations have pledged to participate, according to Marjorie Pritchard, op-ed editor at the Globe.
The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Greenfield Recorder and Athol Daily News all joined small weekly papers with circulation as low as 4,000 to large metropolitan dailies such as the Houston Chronicle, Minneapolis Star Tribune and Miami Herald in pushing back against the antagonistic rhetoric of the president.
“Fake, fake disgusting news,” Trump told an audience at an Aug. 2 political rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He pointed at journalists covering the event and said, “They only make up stories.”
Three days later, Trump called the press “the enemy of the people” in a tweet where he claimed that “they purposely cause great division & distrust.”
Pritchard said last Friday that the decision to seek a coordinated response from newspapers came after Trump appeared to step up his rhetoric in recent weeks.
“Our words will differ. But at least we can agree that such attacks are alarming,” read the appeal by the Globe.
The Gazette’s editor-in-chief, Brooke Hauser, agreed that banding together with other newspapers in the country is necessary to stand up to the president’s assault on news media.
“These repeated attacks on the press are destructive, dangerous and impossible to ignore,” Hauser said. “As journalists, it’s our duty to defend the freedom of the press, which is essential to our democracy. We are not the enemy of the people. We are the people.”
In its editorial, the Gazette says that while the climate is unsettling, it has not deterred the paper from its job explaining often complex issues.
The editorial concludes, “We take seriously our role in helping preserve the democracy that was defined by Thomas Jefferson, who wrote, ‘Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.’
More than 230 years later, those words of the third president ring far truer than the cries of “fake news” from today’s White House.”
Trump is not the first president to feud with the press.
In 1798, President John Adams signed the Alien and Sedition Acts to criminalize false criticisms of the federal government. In the midst of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, President Richard Nixon referred to the press as “leers and sneers of commentators.”
After the killing of five employees by a gunman at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Maryland on June 28, University of Massachussets Amherst journalism professor Steve Fox said, “It seems to be at a different level these days.”
“After all the attacks, it’s nice to see this type of action because you get the sense of fighting back and not just taking it,” Fox said. “On the other hand, it feeds into the president’s narrative of the Trump administration versus the media.”
He expressed mixed feelings about how much the coordinated efforts of the editorial sections could accomplish, adding that Trump will not “see the light of having a free press.”
The answer, for him, lies in educating the public by teaching news literature classes and instructing his students in understanding the difference between verifiable news accounts and propaganda.
He said he worries about what the current political climate means for his students.
“It’s a dangerous time and I don’t know that the editorials will change that. I worry about the safety of my students and friends when they go out reporting,” Fox said.
Another UMass Amherst journalism professor, Karen List, commended the initiative to counter the president’s message.
“The press is called the Fourth Estate for a reason,” List said. “Newspapers, which do most of the reporting, are essential to holding the government accountable to the people. Without it, no one is doing that. Trump would prefer lapdogs, not watchdogs, but this initiative helps us show the American people how wrong he is.”
In St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch called journalists “the truest of patriots.” The Chicago Sun-Times said it believed most Americans know that Trump is talking nonsense. The Fayetteville, N.C., Observer said it hoped Trump would stop, “but we’re not holding our breath.”
“Rather, we hope all the president’s supporters will recognize what he’s doing — manipulating reality to get what he wants,” the North Carolina newspaper said.
Some newspapers used history lessons to state their case. The Elizabethtown Advocate in Elizabethtown, Penn., for instance, compared free press in the United States to such rights promised but not delivered in the former Soviet Union.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
Luis Fieldman can be reached at lfieldman@gazettenet.com.