By David Gordon, Associate Editor
Chippewa Valley newspapers were part of a coordinated national effort on Thursday to respond through editorials to the barrage of attacks unleashed on them by Donald Trump and others who use the press as a convenient target when its coverage is not to their liking.
The goal was for as many U.S. newspapers as possible to write and publish editorials on Thursday that denounced what The Boston Globe called “a dirty war against the free press.” The Globe and The New York Times took the early lead in recruiting newspapers of all sizes to take a united stand against Trump’s attacks regardless of their politics.
(See https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/08/10/globe-calls-for-war-words-against-trump-media-attacks/bOjknXaqL92wsnMPT5ZIVJ/story.html for more on the national effort.)
Both the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and the papers in the River Valley Media Group – which includes The Chippewa Herald and the weekly Dunn County News – participated in this effort.
Josh Trust, publisher of the River Valley papers, said in an email that the journalists working for those papers “produce content daily that matters” and that the papers will “continue to be a watchdog for the communities we serve.” He added that the group participated in the campaign because it deals with an issue “we believe (in) 100%.” (Thursday’s editorial in The Chippewa Herald can be found here.)
Liam Marlaire, the Leader-Telegram’s assistant editor who edits the paper’s opinion page, noted that joining the mass editorial campaign posed a risk of being seen as partisan.
“For us, the intent is not to denigrate either major political party,” he wrote in an email. “This effort is specifically about President Trump’s use of the phrases ‘fake news’ and ‘enemy of the state,’ an ill-conceived attempt to damage the integrity of American journalism.” (The Leader-Telegram‘s editorial can be accessed here.)
More than 400 papers signed on to the effort, ranging in size from large metropolitan dailies (like The Globe and The New York Times) to small weekly papers with circulations of 4,000 or less. Among the other metropolitan dailies that produced editorials on Thursday were the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Houston Chronicle and the Miami Herald. A number of major dailies, including the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, published editorials explaining why they declined to join the effort.
A full list of participants will be released once the final tally is in. The New York Times has published a preliminary list of nearly 200 participating papers (including the Leader-Telegram), along with excerpts from many of their editorials.
Many weekly papers that belong to the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors (ISWNE) have said, through an online discussion list, that they would participate in this effort. Several editors, who have supported Trump and his policies, indicated they would not participate.
One of the recurrent themes in the ISWNE discussions is that journalists are members of their communities rather than “enemies of the people.” Some writers have noted that journalists at all levels do their best to provide useful and necessary information for their audiences, but that they are human and mistakes will occur. . . and that papers will generally do their best to correct those errors when they are notified of them.
Regardless of the paper’s size, many of Thursday’s editorials stressed the role of an independent press in a democracy. That role is to provide information that the public needs to have in order to make informed decisions about candidates for office as well as expressing themselves on a broad range of public policy issues.
This is why the press was given protection under the First Amendment against efforts to censor or suppress it. Some of Thursday’s editorials stressed that the current attacks on the press, and on the journalists who are part of it, seem designed to destroy public confidence in anything that is reported.
If that were to happen, the government (regardless of which party or faction is in control) could easily swoop into the information vacuum and shape public perceptions and discussions to its own ends. To paraphrase a comment from the ISWNE discussion, any president who attacks the country’s free press – or any broad segment of it – is a danger to American democracy.
Note: the CVPost is unable to participate in today’s national editorial campaign because the ground rules require that all material written as part of it be the product of an editorial board, and the CVPost hasn’t progressed to the point where we have one.