This week belongs to our readers

While some might joke otherwise, National Newspaper Week, which begins today, is not the modern version of National Buggy Whip Month in the early 20th century.

Though many newspapers are struggling amid a transition to online news and against many people’s belief that paying for this valuable commodity is unnecessary, the need for what local news operations do has not diminished.

And local newspapers continue to do it better than anyone else.

When local school boards and municipal officials consider raising your property taxes, your local newspaper is there.

When citizens press for answers about the safety of the Mariner East pipeline being built in Chester and Delaware counties, we’re there. When the underfunding of schools threatens a music program in a local district like Pottstown, we report on the issues and potential consequence.

When North Penn School District weighs a $6 million upgrade to the high school sports stadium, we report the details of the plan and its costs. We report on the aggressive efforts of Norristown police to combat crime in the city.

Local zoning decisions on plans to build new housing in your neighborhood, regulate bars in your downtowns and provide for warehouses and industrial expansion receive coverage and attract considerable interest..

The newspapers and news sites of MediaNews Group focus on all aspects of our region that includes Berks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties— triumphs on fields of play, struggles with illness, the good works of local institutions and people — because this region is our home, too. If it happens here, we consider it our business and yours.

In that spirit, your newspaper embraces the theme of this year’s National Newspaper Week — Know Your Five Freedoms.

It celebrates the five freedoms of the First Amendment — freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble and the public’s right to let government know when it’s doing wrong.

Those five were put first for a reason: They’re the strongest weapons the public has in protecting the rest of the freedoms spelled out in the Bill of Rights.

Your newspaper doesn’t pester public officials for the sake of it. It demands answers to legitimate questions, documents that should be public and open meetings for your sake. A newspaper’s motive in these battles is singular: to protect citizens’ right to know what their elected officials are doing, the right that underlies the freedom of the press.

That right to know is what got freedom of the press its first big victory in Colonial America. And it’s instructive to review the story of how John Peter Zenger, a German-born publisher of a journal critical of a royal governor, won his fight.

Zenger’s New York Weekly Journal reported on corruption by Gov. William Cosby. This resulted in Zenger’s arrest for libel, then defined as printing anything critical about a person in authority.

Zenger’s attorney, Andrew Hamilton of Philadelphia, acknowledged his client was responsible for the published material that offended the king’s agent in the middle colonies. The thing for the jury to decide, Hamilton said, was whether the charges in Zenger’s articles about Cosby were based in fact.

Truth as a firewall against libel has been a bedrock of American law ever since. Libel law has developed in a healthy direction: Public officials can be offended all they want by newspaper reports. Their burden is to prove that negative reports were knowingly and maliciously untrue.

Though this is at times confused — even by some journalists — our job in reporting news is not to determine the truth. It is to report the facts. How those facts add up is something decided most often by the voters and on rare occasions prosecutors.

Even in a hyperpartisan age such as ours, a newspaper’s goal is good journalism — reporting aimed at informing, not persuading readers in the exercise of their rights and duties as citizens.

This is a call to all readers to mark National Newspaper Week as a celebration of your most important rights. Please make a commitment to exercising them fully by staying informed on the issues of the day.

We are working hard to make sure you have the facts.