By Jeremy D. Wells
Carter County Times
This week’s guest editorial, on the importance of local newspapers and how they differ from “the media” at the national level, was exactly what I needed to see when it came across my feed. See, I’ve been having a rough week.
No, it isn’t because of the election.
It’s more to do with what was going on in the leadup to last Tuesday, and what’s been going on since. One of the things that has been obvious since 2016 is that President-elect Donald Trump is not a fan of the national media – or the “fake news” as he so famously calls it. Though I doubt very seriously he’s had publications like the Carter County Times in mind when he has criticized “the media,” that criticism has had a trickle-down effect. (Moreso than any tax cuts for the wealthy have ever had, at least.)
While he might not have meant for that criticism to impact locally focused media outlets and reporters, in several ways it did.
And it has continued to do so since then. While covering events as innocuous as Memory Days I’ve had people refuse to talk with me. Not because they are bashful, or because they don’t want their name or picture in the paper, but because they “don’t trust the media.”
Apparently not even to ask them something as benign as “How did you like the parade?”
It’s something everyone in local media has become accustomed to over the last 8 years. We have to continually work to maintain your trust, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s something every reporter should be cognizant of and working towards anyway.
I was ready for a possible increase in those types of struggles and interactions.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the vitriol from those on the left, who have decided this most recent Trump victory is the fault of the media as well, and that any and all of us working to deliver unbiased and objective news deserve anything bad that happens to us as a result.
Never mind that media skepticism is already high among the president-elect’s most vociferous supporters, so any extra criticism the media might have chosen to level at him would have ultimately fallen on deaf ears – or, more likely, further embolden his base. Many of them already believe the media (and here I’m talking national media) is fake news, after all.
And it was Trump’s appeal to his base that won the election this time around. He galvanized the folks who supported him, while the Democrats floundered from a lackluster Joe Biden, to a complete upending of the ticket, to then squandering any excitement that change may have generated by building a campaign aimed more at courting the handful of disillusioned Republican and Independent voters than appealing to the base that put Biden and Harris in the White House four-years ago.
I guess in their anger and disillusionment with the loss of that base – which the numbers seem to indicate stayed home rather than support a Harris-Walz ticket – they needed someone to lash out at too. And, once again, “the media” made a convenient whipping boy.
I can understand that too, even if I don’t agree with it.
What I absolutely was not prepared for, however, was to have folks on both sides laughing at jokes about building the gallows for the reporters. I wasn’t expecting a friend of 30 years to tell me that, “When the fascists come for you, you’ll all deserve it for not doing more to prevent this.”
But that’s not the role of media; be they national media or locally operated newspapers. Our job isn’t to tell you what you should think, or how you should vote.
Our job is to tell you what is happening. To tell you what your elected officials, and those who aspire to that office, are saying. Our job is to provide you with objective facts and data, so that you can make an informed choice that aligns best with your ideals, inclinations, and convictions.
For papers like this one, that means focusing on what’s going on in the communities around you – not trying to sway you on who you should pick for president. If a local newspaper endorses a candidate or issue – as we did on Amendment 2 – it should be a local candidate or issue. Because those are the issues that impact us where we live, and these are the candidates we know and work with regularly.
I’ve been disillusioned this week, as family and longtime friends and acquaintances across the political spectrum have jumped on the media hate bandwagon. It’s made me question why I bother at all. But somewhere deep beneath all that angst, I know why I do it. I know why this paper has value. I know the importance of a free and independent press.
I just hope you all feel the same way and continue to find value in it too, regardless of how any of us voted.
Contact the writer at editor@cartercountytimes.com
