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Off the Record, by Kevin Sweeney

Wow, I used to think being called a “media jackal” was bad.

Back when Jesse Ventura was governor, he referred to the media covering the state Capitol as “Media Jackals.” He even spent taxpayer money to print up new media credentials that designated the holder as a “Media Jackal.”

A lot of reporters thought it was funny, and wore their “Jackal” badges with pride, but a lot of us felt it was rude and insulting. After a bit of an outcry, the Jackal badges were replaced by regular Media credentials, but many reporters from that era, I’m sure, still cherish those Jackal badges as collectors’ items.

What did the reporters covering the governor do to deserve his reproach? They did their job, reporting honestly and truthfully about the governor. When he did a bad job, they said so. When he left the office early on weekdays and stayed away on weekends, they reported it. When he used his unusual position as governor to get a lucrative job as a celebrity referee for a special World Wrestling Federation event, they reported on that.

Still, being a Jackal is not as bad as being an “enemy of the people.” That is what our president tweeted last week about all the big establishment news outlets – the major networks, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and so on. He tweeted they were not his enemy, they were the enemy of the American People.

Wow.

What did they do to deserve that? According to Donald Trump, they print “FAKE NEWS!” Fake News is a fairly recent term that arose with the internet. Some people, motivated by greed, some by the desire for political gain, would post stories that were patently false on the internet in hopes of getting readership and misleading the masses. The most notorious example is the “Pizzagate” story that Hillary Clinton was running a child enslavement and pornography ring out of a pizza shop in Washington D.C. It led one man to pack his gun and head to Washington to check it out and save those kids.

That, people, is fake news.

To Trump, fake news is anything that disagrees with his view of the world. His inauguration crowd wasn’t the biggest ever? FAKE NEWS! He didn’t win the popular vote? FAKE NEWS! There’s no evidence of the kind of voter fraud he claims cost him the popular vote? FAKE NEWS! His administration is not running like a well-oiled machine? FAKE NEWS!

When the Mainstream Media — which I define as the news organizations that check and substantiate their facts and report the truth as accurately and objectively as they can — differ with the president, who are you going to believe? Obviously, a lot of Trump followers choose to believe his tweets. He uses social media to get his message directly to you, without the filter of reporters, editors and fact checkers.

Well, having worked as a journalist my whole adult life, I’d rather believe the media. We’re not perfect, we make mistakes, we have biases that we try, not always successfully, to keep out of the news reporting, if not the editorial and opinion columns.

But we don’t make things up. In those rare instances where someone does make something up, it is usually found out and the reporter who did it gets fired, and rarely finds another job in the media.

Let’s talk about the role of the media and the government. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says it best. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

That’s the first item in the bill of rights — Freedom of Religion, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom to Peaceably Assembly, and Freedom to tell the government when it has done you wrong without getting punished for it.

The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing when they set that up. The newspapers in those days were far from objective. Each party had their own, and they railed and stormed at their opponents while they defended their own. Presidents have always grumbled about the press, but they have always recognized the role that the news media plays in keeping the people informed about their government and protecting their rights from government encroachment. This is a job that the Mainstream Media takes very seriously, and will continue to perform whether President Trump likes it or not.

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Kevin Sweeney has been the managing editor of The Journal since May 1985. A native of St. Paul, he worked at newspapers in LeSueur and Albert Lea before moving to New Ulm. Contact him at ksweeney@nujournal.com.

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