How We Honor The First Amendment
The journalistic profession is often too narcissistic for me, which is why I don’t engage much in media navelgazing. Recent events leave me little choice but to do so. I was transfixed by the Women’s March last month—the wall-to-wall TV coverage, the tweets, the texts. In the midst of all that a new president touted his “running war” with the media and declared journalists “are among the most dishonest human beings on earth.”
We’ve actually been here before, though never with the same intensity or vitriol. In 1970, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, a hatchet man for Richard Nixon, let loose on journalists. He called them “nattering nabobs of negativism” who have “formed their own 4-H club—the hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history.” What was stinging back then seems merely clever today.
I got into journalism during the tumultuous 1970s—war, social unrest and Watergate. I was exhilarated by the purpose, responsibilities and powers of journalism. A Gallup poll in 1976 found that 72% of Americans had a “great deal/fair amount” of faith in mass media. Life is similarly challenging today, but trust in media has tanked. Gallup puts it at 32%, the lowest ever. Perhaps that’s why so-called fake news, a conflation of fabricated-for-profit news and partisan beliefs, has taken hold across the populace.
Fake news isn’t new either. William Jennings Bryan, himself a populist, used the term during political runs in the 1890s. Today, it’s more than a problem for Facebook, under fire for algorithmically distributing fake stories in its news feeds. Fake news delegitimizes facts, which leads to claims of media dishonesty, which produces “alternative facts,” which delegitimize the media itself, which brings us to the First Amendment and freedom of the press.
I discussed all this at a Forbes Town Hall meeting in January. I told our 400 employees there is only one answer: “Focus, focus on quality journalism—great reporting, great editing and sound analytic argument.” That’s what our trained journalists and 2,000 topic experts who write for this magazine and Forbes.com must commit themselves to every day.
My journalistic bible is a movie— All the President’s Men, the story of Watergate and the Washington Post. Near its dramatic ending, Ben Bradlee, the newspaper’s legendary editor, tells his two star reporters: “Nothing’s riding on this except the First Amendment of the Constitution, freedom of the press and maybe the future of the country.” I think about that line more than ever. I believe Forbes journalists will do the same.