A Free Press Needs You

The Boston Globe put out a call to newspapers across the country to defend the importance of journalism to American democracy. Journalists are not the enemy, is the point the Globe asked all newspapers to address in editorials to be published today. As they point out:

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.

More than 350 news outlets answered the call, and the Globe has mapped them out. As the New York Times points out, “A Free Press Needs You.” The editors there conclude their editorial by saying, “If you haven’t already, please subscribe to your local papers. Praise them when you think they’ve done a good job and criticize them when you think they could do better. We’re all in this together.”

Today, I made a donation to the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, which is a startup effort to catalyze new approaches to journalism in the Boston area.