Editorial: How we restore faith in journalism

By The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board

Aug. 15, 2018 5 PM PT

The president of the United States enjoys hurling insults, like a howitzer firing shells, at American institutions. The court system. The FBI. The “Justice” Department. The media. The U.S. Congress. As is true for all 487 people, places and things that The New York Times says Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter since declaring his presidential candidacy, none of these institutions is perfect. They make mistakes. Like the presidency, they also make a difference in people’s daily lives.

Consider the potential of tens of thousands of news media members. Consider the potential of The San Diego Union-Tribune’s staff.

These journalists seek the truth and report it while minimizing harm every day. They don’t promote any single person, ideology or political agenda. Their only agenda is the truth.

Just one example? Without the hard work of journalists at several local news outlets, the region’s deadly hepatitis A outbreak may have been much worse. When The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board named the 20 unidentified people who died during the crisis as its 2017 people of the year, we wrote, “These 20 hepatitis A deaths represent the real cost of a series of public policy errors, missteps and inaction.” If not for journalists, these government lapses would have been more egregious.

That’s why the president’s recent tweet that “the fake news” is “the Enemy of the People” and “very dangerous & sick” is itself dangerous. Flooded with Trump’s anti-press sentiments, people increasingly agree with the president; when asked “which comes closer to your point of view: the news media is the enemy of the people, or the news media is an important part of democracy?” 26 percent said the former in a new Quinnipiac University poll of 1,175 U.S. voters. Forty-four percent said they are concerned Trump’s criticism of the news media will lead to violence against people working in it.

While his words inflict harm, Trump didn’t invent the term “fake news.” It dates back to the 1800s. He also isn’t the first to weaponize media mistrust.

When Richard Nixon conceded the California governor’s race in a speech in 1962, he told reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore,” and he urged editors “to put one reporter on the campaign who will report what the candidate says now and then.”

Eight years later, at a speech in San Diego, then-President Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, famously decried “the nattering nabobs of negativism” who “have formed their own 4-H Club — the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” Agnew’s speechwriter, William Safire, wrote years later that the sweeping indictment decried “defeatists in general rather than the press in particular.” But less than a year after The New York Times quoted the line in correct context while covering it live, a Newsday columnist cited “nattering nabobs” as an attack on the press and The Times and Time got it wrong later, too, as writer Norman P. Lewis reported in 2010.

By then, Lewis says, veteran journalists from David Broder to Helen Thomas had repeated the line as a classic example of the Nixon administration’s assault on the press. In that anecdote can be seen the perils of a press that gets it wrong or even not quite right. As Lewis put it, “Journalists who wear the ‘nattering nabobs’ phrase as a badge of honor are merely proving that Agnew was right about their penchant for repeating inaccurate information.”

Agnew’s 50-cent words have given way decades later to blunt Trumpian terms like “disgusting,” “dishonest,” “phony” and “fake” that play to his base’s belief that the news media as an entity is out to get Trump. “Just remember,” Trump said in Missouri last month, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”

Yet the news media as a single entity is a myth. Yes, more than 350 newspaper editorial boards chose Thursday, at the suggestion of The Boston Globe, to write a wave of editorials that would criticize Trump’s false claims of “fake news.” But individual journalists at individual outlets chose the individual words. And in a separate effort, The San Diego Union-Tribune added a page to its website this week — see it at sdut.us/whatwedo — to explain how we seek the truth every day. How we strive for accuracy, fairness and inclusion. How we correct errors and separate news from opinion. How we earn trust one story, one reader at a time.

Journalism is a public service, and fewer readers means fewer reporters means fewer stories about how people live and die in San Diego. An investment in the U-T is an investment in community, the future, democracy.

The San Diego chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists named U-T Watchdog reporters Jeff McDonald and Morgan Cook as its 2015 and 2017 journalists of the year and editorial cartoonist Steve Breen as its 2018 Excellence in Journalism Award winner. Pursuit of the truth is what motivated all three. McDonald and Cook held government officials accountable. Breen’s sketches of homeless residents empowered the powerless.

Even if sudden violence stuns our industry, the free press safeguarded in the U.S. Constitution will endure. Why? Because there are 7,591 words in the U.S. Constitution but none more important than the first three, “We the People.”

The Constitution doesn’t call journalists enemies or divide Americans into us and them.

Distrust is not easy to dismantle. But journalists at The San Diego Union-Tribune and nationwide will keep advocating for a free and fair press. With this president. And the next. And the next. And the next. And all who follow.

No, not all California newspapers joined pro-press editorials around the country

Readers react to free press editorials from nation’s newspapers

Get a digital subscription to the Union-Tribune for 13 weeks for just 99 cents

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion