Congress shall make no law...

To tell you the truth, I was preparing to mock the idea of a couple hundred newspapers' getting together all at the same time to punch back at El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago. It seems like so much inside-baseball wankery, and it didn't look to change any minds, and, frankly, the real enemy of local newspapers are the beancounters in the various corporate headquarters who think you can cover a city with two reporters, a laptop, and a couple of drones. Media consolidation and corporate timidity completed the job that Spiro Agnew started in the modern era. But I thought about the year 2030, and then I changed my mind.

One day in the future, when the awful crime this country committed against itself somehow has been largely expiated, it's going to be important to remember who stood against an incompetent and half-mad Peronista wannabe, and who did not. That the idea came from my most recent alma mater fills me with not a little pride, too. From the editorial published in The Boston Globe on Thursday, its central theme reiterated in 200 newspapers, small and large, all across the country:

Replacing a free media with a state-run media has always been a first order of business for any corrupt regime taking over a country. Today in the United States we have a president who has created a mantra that members of the media who do not blatantly support the policies of the current US administration are the “enemy of the people.” This is one of the many lies that have been thrown out by this president, much like an old-time charlatan threw out “magic” dust or water on a hopeful crowd...

Charlie Leight Getty Images

There was once broad, bipartisan, intergenerational agreement in the United States that the press played this important role. Yet that view is no longer shared by many Americans. “The news media is the enemy of the American people,” is a sentiment endorsed by 48 percent of Republicans surveyed this month by Ipsos polling firm. That poll is not an outlier. One published this week found 51 percent of Republicans considered the press “the enemy of the people rather than an important part of democracy.”

Having spent the last two decades watching American newspapers flounder against new technologies, and debase themselves in a hundred ways trying to coddle what readers they had by telling those readers what they wanted to hear, rather than what they needed to hear, and turning "objectivity" and "balance" into a kind of survival cult in which any idea, no matter how pernicious, was treated as having an equal value with any other idea simply because a desperate business model didn't want to lose even one set of eyeballs, it was bracing to see the editorials call out their readers for failing to inform themselves the way good citizens of a self-governing republic should. That was long overdue. It also recognizes that newspapers are trying to atone for their own shortcomings in abetting a spavined and desiccated attitude toward the truth that made the current president* not only possible, but inevitable.



I still don't think this changes any minds. But I no longer think that's important. Sometimes, it's just the right thing to do simply to yell at the correct buildings. Truth is in a fight for survival at the moment, and if this profession won't join that fight, it's hard to think of another one that will. If the role of the press in a self-governing republic is going to be imperiled, can it at least be imperiled by a person of some substance, instead of a television carny barker confused by the concept of time zones? I mean, holy hell, this profession has faced down dictators and actual armies. What good are we if we can't defend ourselves against an obvious clown?

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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