John Diaz, the editorial page editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, called it. At the invitation of the Boston Globe, hundreds of newspapers were set to publish editorials on Thursday with a unified message for their readers: The press is not the enemy of the people, and the president is wrong to say that it is. Diaz anticipated backlash from Trump.
“I can just anticipate his Thursday morning tweets accusing the ‘FAKE NEWS MEDIA’ of ‘COLLUSION!’ and ‘BIAS!’” he wrote on Wednesday evening in explaining why his paper would sit this one out.
Sure enough:
The Boston Globe, which was sold to the the Failing New York Times for 1.3 BILLION DOLLARS (plus 800 million dollars in losses & investment), or 2.1 BILLION DOLLARS, was then sold by the Times for 1 DOLLAR. Now the Globe is in COLLUSION with other papers on free press. PROVE IT!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 16, 2018
But Diaz deserves credit for something far more meaningful than accurate prognostication. What he wrote next was among the most convincing arguments for why the organized editorial drive could backfire—or at the least, in his newspaper’s case, not merit participation. “[Trump] surely will attempt to cite this day of editorials to discredit critical and factual news stories in the future,” wrote Diaz, “even though no one involved in those pieces had anything to do with this campaign.”
It is a flawed assumption that casual news readers make a distinction between a newspaper’s editorial board and its reporters such that they won’t hold the former’s opinions against the latter’s journalism. Ultimately, it is on consumers to make such a distinction, when they take editorials seriously at all. But editorial boards across the country were begging readers to do just that in this instance—and in unison. The Baltimore Sun’s editorial board addressed the problem of the coordinated campaign in its editorial: “[A] coordinated response from independent—dare we say ‘mainstream’—news organizations feeds a narrative that we’re somehow aligned against this Republican president.” To put a point on it: It’s worth pausing before calling so much attention to yourself.
Jake Tapper spoke to this eloquently during an awards speech last year. Part of the media’s service to the public, Tapper said, “is to preserve the foundation on which journalists stand. And that foundation is built on concepts such as fairness, and non-partisanship, and doing our jobs without fear or favor.
“When we tweet every emotion we have every moment we have them, we undermine that foundation. When we publish or broadcast shoddy journalism, we undermine it. When we do not rise to the moment, we undermine it. And that undermines what we are fighting for.”
A plea from editorialists to take hard news seriously cannot prevent such self-sabotage, or convince the public that it doesn’t exist. The president’s general attacks against the press are at the least obnoxious—and at the most untrue. There is no better way to demonstrate the latter point than to place facts above all else: facts above opinions, and facts above the people who report them, so that journalism is driven by news and not personality.
It is unfortunate that the president has poisoned the well so pervasively that a large group of Americans distrust the media by default. Every newscast could be delivered by Murrow, every report filed by Woodward and Bernstein, every column written by Mike Royko, and still, for at least the present, millions of Americans wouldn’t buy any of it. This does not mean that practicing good journalism isn’t worth it. Rather, it implies that doing so is an opportunity to win such people back, to avoid losing any more who are also tempted to bail, and to ensure that high standards are not sacrificed for fighting.
The public will note the press’s success not when they are begged to, but when the evidence is apparent.
