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On the 21st September 2018 Alfred Friendly Press Partners reports

Kathleen Kennedy Townsend said President Trump’s attacks on the media are in stark contrast to the “deep respect” President John F. Kennedy, her uncle, and Robert F. Kennedy, her father, held for the journalism profession and its role in safeguarding democracy.

Both worked as international correspondents for newspapers, and both maintained strong friendships with reporters and editors while they held political office, Kennedy Townsend said during the Alfred Friendly Foundation’s annual gala on Sept. 7.

“There is always some tensions between the press and the politicians — and I speak from experience,” the former lieutenant governor of Maryland said. “But it doesn’t have to be so virulent. How my family interacted with the press — there were plenty of ups and downs, but it was a profoundly different experience than the one we’re having today.”

Kennedy Townsend said a prime example was a telegram that JFK sent to Alfred Friendly in 1968 congratulating The Washington Post correspondent for winning the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the the Middle East War.

“It is perhaps the highest tribute that can be paid to a member of your profession,” Kennedy wrote from his Indiana hotel. One month later, Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

Kennedy Townsend read the telegram to the audience at the National Press Club and said “it was a mark of deep respect, for the reporters and the press, born of my father’s deep appreciation of constitutional protections and affinity for reporters. He got it. He knew it was important.”

Robert Kennedy’s understanding also had roots in his own experience covering Israel’s fight for independence in 1948 when he was 22, she said. RFK was assassinated by a Palestinian/Jordanian immigrant on the anniversary of the start of the Arab-Israeli war that Friendly covered. “The Six Day War was very important to him in his life — I remember conversations we had. I think it was because of his support for Israel that he died.”

John F. Kennedy also wrote about international relations as a reporter for Hearst newspapers in the summer of 1945. He toured bomb-damaged Berlin, watched Joseph Stalin and Harry Truman interact at the Potsdam Conference and attended the opening of the United Nations.

“They knew the value of foreign correspondents,” Kennedy Townsend said. She was personally impressed by the comments at the gala by reporters from India and Sudan who spoke of their experience in the Alfred Friendly fellowship program and their career aspirations.   

“They touched my heart,” Kennedy Townsend said of Samarth Bansal, Ankur Paliwal and Zeinab Salih. “You could see these are people who want to help their country and want to write about what’s true and expose injustices in our world and do it with great courage.”

But Kennedy Townsend added, “This is a trying time to welcome (Alfred Friendly) Fellows to the United States. We Americans have prided ourselves for so long about our free press and its importance in our constitution and our history. Yet, as you know, the press is under attack. The president has called the press the enemy of the people.”

Trump’s rhetoric has an impact in other countries, she said, and called Turkish President Erdogan’s railing against “fake news” a “chilling” example of how other leaders are using cues from Trump to legitimize attacks on the media.

“It’s our duty is to object and say this is wrong and must not stand,” Kennedy Townsend said.

She pointed out a few good trends, such as the increased circulation of national newspapers holding Trump to task and a recent joint editorial by a large number of newspapers stressing the importance of a free press.

“You members of the press, with each story, with each revelation, you are freedom’s fighters; you are on the front lines in creating a culture that says: truth matters; facts make a difference; lies will eventually be outed. This is true in the United States and its true around the world.”

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On the 22nd August 2018 The Cap Times editorial reports

These are tough times for journalism in America.

Newspapers have been folding, newsrooms have been thinning out, editors and reporters are being laid off at alarming rates. Hedge-fund owners are sacrificing local journalism to pad their profits. Mergers and acquisitions are dumbing down print, broadcast, and online media in pursuit of a one-size-fits-all bottom line. Federal policies are promoting consolidation and profiteering, while failing to adequately fund public and community media.

But newspapers remain committed to the defense of freedom of the press — and to the democracy that is underpinned by speak-truth-to-power journalism. Last week, The Capital Times joined newspapers across the country in a national show of solidarity with the First Amendment.

It was a necessary response to Donald Trump’s disdain for the basic premises of the American experiment, which he regularly evidences with crude attacks on journalists and journalism.

At a time when America needs to be urgently concerned with the work of renewing and extending the promise of a free press, Trump is making a bad situation worse. He has empowered a wrecking crew at the Federal Communications Commission, where his appointees are working overtime to scrap neutrality and protections for media competition and diversity.

But Trump is doing even more damage with his steady stream of angry pronouncements regarding specific reporters and media outlets, and his dismissive attitude toward the role that journalism plays in maintaining a free and functional society.

At a time when America needs leadership on behalf of press freedom, Trump is actively steering the discourse in the wrong direction with his claims that “very unpatriotic” journalists are putting “the lives of many” at risk by reporting on government affairs.

It was honest concern about the president’s beligerent attitude toward journalists and journalism that led The Capital Times and newspapers across the country to heed the call of The Boston Globe for a show of editorial-page engagement last Thursday.

Newspapers spoke in different voices.

But, as Cap Times readers know, this newspaper shouts whenever powerful figures abuse their positions.

And, surely, Donald Trump is abusing his position.

We do not believe that the right response to this president’s authoritarian tendencies is feel-good pontificating that merely begs the president to be nice to journalists.

What is required is something far more specific, and far more intellectually and politically honest, than a simple assertion that journalists are not the enemy of the people. There has to be a renewal of the historic understanding of journalism as a check and balance on all power: Republican and Democratic, private and public, political and corporate. This reassertion must be rooted in an essential recognition that no president who takes seriously an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” the Constitution would say what Trump is saying. But it must go deeper than that.

When John F. Kennedy addressed the American Newspaper Publishers Association just two months after he was sworn in as the 35th president in January 1961, he explained: “I have selected as the title of my remarks tonight ‘The President and the Press.’ Some may suggest that this would be more naturally worded ‘The President Versus the Press.’ But those are not my sentiments tonight.”

Kennedy went on to tell the assembled publishers, “(My) purpose here tonight is not to deliver the usual assault on the so-called one-party press. On the contrary, in recent months I have rarely heard any complaints about political bias in the press except from a few Republicans. Nor is it my purpose tonight to discuss or defend the televising of presidential press conferences. I think it is highly beneficial to have some 20,000,000 Americans regularly sit in on these conferences to observe, if I may say so, the incisive, the intelligent and the courteous qualities displayed by your Washington correspondents.”

Kennedy was poking fun at the White House correspondents of his day, who were generally incisive and intelligent, but not always as courteous as presidents prefer.

Yet the point of Kennedy’s speech was a serious one. He had come, as a new president, to talk about the relationship between his administration and the media. He acknowledged “the dilemma faced by a free and open society in a cold and secret war,” and he spoke honestly of his hope for a measure of restraint in the coverage of particularly sensitive global disputes. But he also said: “The question is for you alone to answer. No public official should answer it for you. No governmental plan should impose its restraints against your will.”

Yes, Kennedy suggested, the administration’s views might clash with those of its inquisitors. But, he added, “I not only could not stifle controversy among your readers — I welcome it. This administration intends to be candid about its errors; for as a wise man once said: ‘An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.’ We intend to accept full responsibility for our errors; and we expect you to point them out when we miss them.”

That’s the opposite of Trump’s approach.

But the opposite of Trump is what American needs now.

In these most challenging of times, honorable leaders of all parties and all ideologies must recognize, as did JFK: “Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed — and no republic can survive. That is why the Athenian lawmaker Solon decreed it a crime for any citizen to shrink from controversy. And that is why our press was protected by the First Amendment — the only business in America specifically protected by the Constitution — not primarily to amuse and entertain, not to emphasize the trivial and the sentimental, not to simply ‘give the public what it wants’ — but to inform, to arouse, to reflect, to state our dangers and our opportunities, to indicate our crises and our choices, to lead, mold, educate and sometimes even anger public opinion.”

Read original article in The Cap Times