The press is not “the enemy of the people.” Any journalist worth anything will tell you that our entire job is to serve the people, to educate them on what’s happening behind closed doors, to ensure that people are held accountable for their actions. This journalist will tell you that the people who tell you this are the real enemy.

As just a citizen, to be told that what I’m hearing on the news and what I’m reading in the papers is not the truth is unsettling; but as a journalist, I know that this is just the rhetoric used by someone who dislikes their coverage and instead of changing the error of their ways, they create distrust in news outlets. President Trump has been breeding this hate and mistrust at his rallies for a long time. It’s a staple of his and something he’s spread throughout his administration and his base. It’s become expected that if you’re a journalist covering the president, you’ll be deemed fake news. I was. I’d never even covered the president’s actions outside of editorials like this one, but I was still called fake news when he visited St. Charles, I was still booed by 1,000 people who had come to see him speak. I was only 16.

For sure, our press has a lot of freedom, more than many other press corps in the world where journalists are jailed for simply telling the truth about what their government is doing. But we’re reaching a point in our own media where anyone who criticizes the administration is burned at the stake, harassed and screamed at. We’re reaching a point where the distrust in media is so strong, journalists have to fear for their safety covering his rallies. We’re reaching a point of no return.

Without journalism dedicated to getting the truth out there, no matter what it is, the integrity of our democracy is compromised. Without investigative journalists educating voters on the actual rhetoric of a politician and their party, we will continue to see a decline in approval of the government and have no way to solve our uneasiness. The way to find trust in the government and the media is not to let it reach rock bottom and see anarchy around us. It’s educating ourselves, finding the best, non-biased journalism available to us and using that knowledge. It’s giving journalists a chance to repair the damage done by biased media sources and letting them hold people accountable for their mistakes, even if you support the politician. It is giving journalism a chance.