Editorial
By Carlos Santos, publisher
Last week the Fluvanna Review published a story on a proposed 4 percent meals tax. We also published a story on school lunch debts, local karate athletes heading to Brazil and about the new school staff. None of it’s fake news.
The stories are about life in Fluvanna County. We work hard to cover news in the county every week and cringe when we get anything wrong. We work hard to stay unbiased, to report fairly, to paint the most accurate picture we can of any event, crime or government action. We have no agenda but to report the news as truthfully as we can.
So, we join newspapers from across the country who this week are using their editorial pages to defend our profession against President Trump’s unfair criticism of the media.
Politics aside, we believe the president’s sweeping, wrong-headed attacks on the free press hurt our country and every citizen in it.
In Fargo, N.D., at a June 27 rally, the president taunted the media a number of times, encouraging jeers from the audience. At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, he pointed at reporters and called them “horrible, horrendous people.”
“They can make anything bad, because they are fake, fake disgusting news,” he said. We’ve lost count of the number of times the president has used the term fake news – a term he often reserves only for news that makes him look bad.
Though his criticism is aimed at the national media, the unfair characterizations filter down to the smaller daily and weekly papers. He’s the president after all. He leads the country and to a degree informs our American culture.
Our job at its core is to give our readers the rough draft of Fluvanna County’s history – good and bad – every week. We take that job seriously.
We are not the enemy of the people. Untruths are the enemy of the people. The media, despite its faults, is one of our pillars of democracy.
We understand that at times we in the media deserve criticism. Send your letters to the editor and we publish that criticism. Now, try criticizing a president who has a state-run media. Let me know how that goes.
