I arrived at college in 1992 with no idea what I wanted to do with my one precious life.
I had always loved to write, and freshman English quickly became my favorite class. One day my professor pulled me aside and encouraged me to go check out the student newspaper. You clearly like to write, she told me, and they always need writers.
Off I went in search of a newsroom and a purpose. I quickly found both. Here was a cacophonous, messy, chaotic space inside an ancient, repurposed gym, next to ROTC training, with ringing phones and piles of yellowing newspapers and a bunch of loud-mouthed, curious, hilarious, good-trouble-making misfits.
Before I fell in love with journalism, I fell in love with journalists.
Someone itching to speak truth to power? Check. Someone who enjoyed dissecting the faculty senate budget? Check. Someone who could quote two decades of football team stats? Check. Someone who took delight in the quiet, lovely human stories that populate a campus? Check. Someone obsessed with comma placement? Check.
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, our newspaper adviser told us. Tell the truth and don’t be afraid, our masthead reminded us. Heady stuff for a 17-year-old kid who arrived at college a little lost, a little sheltered and a little hungry for heroes.
As relieved as I was to find something resembling a calling, I was even more transformed by what it awakened in me, which was a sense of ownership in and responsibility for the communities and institutions I joined.
Want to know how student fees are spent? Ask. You’re paying them. Want to know what the university president makes? Ask. You’re paying him. Want to know why the dorm food is so awful? Ask. You’re paying for it. Want to know how many sexual assaults happened on campus last year? Ask. You’re paying to live and learn and walk around here.
I was at Eastern Illinois University — a public institution funded by and for the public. My classmates weren’t walking around with trust funds. We were walking around with loans or work-study arrangements or our hard-working parents’ hard-earned money or, in a lot of cases, all of the above. Our questions felt justified and personal. The answers felt deserved and mandatory.
Pretty quickly I learned to quiet my instinct to politely accept as the final word whatever an authority figure offered. Pretty quickly I learned that when you have a stake in someplace — a school, a neighborhood, a workplace, a city, a country (ahem) — you get to ask uncomfortable questions and demand inconvenient answers. Pretty quickly I learned that’s how you do your part to protect that place’s health and safety and sustainability and ability to care for all of its inhabitants equally and impartially.
Pretty quickly I learned that the people running those places answer to the people inhabiting those places— not the other way around.
Pretty quickly I realized that we get to shape the places that so profoundly shape us.
And pretty quickly I graduated and learned that loud-mouthed, curious, hilarious, good-trouble-making misfits make up a lot of professional newsrooms too. Thank goodness.
You don’t have to be a journalist to demand answers from people in charge. But you do have to demand answers from people in charge to be a journalist. Because your job is to ask and listen and report back to anyone who doesn’t have access to the people in charge.
So it dismays me to watch Donald Trump’s administration hand-select which reporters can ask questions of the president. It frustrates me to watch White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt call that “giving the power back to the people.” And it scares me to think what will go unasked, unanswered, unspoken and unchecked.
“Having served as a Moscow correspondent in the early days of Putin’s reign, this reminds me of how the Kremlin took over its own press pool and made sure that only compliant journalists were given access,” Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for the New York Times, tweeted after the White House announced the new policy. “The message is clear. Given that the White House has already kicked one news organization out of the pool because of coverage it does not like, it is making certain everyone else knows that the rest of us can be barred too if the president does not like our questions or stories.”
The news organization Baker referenced is the Associated Press, which the administration barred from entering the White House or traveling with journalists on Air Force One after the AP refused to use “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico, which Trump ordered renamed.
“Every president of both parties going back generations subscribed to the principle that a president doesn’t pick the press corps that is allowed in the room to ask him questions,” Baker continued. “Trump has just declared that he will.”
Access is not a trophy to be handed out to obedient participants in the president’s — any president’s — tale-spinning. Access is the price the president pays for the privilege of serving his constituents.
Because the White House belongs to the people. And its occupant answers to the people — even the people he loathes. Even the people who didn’t vote for him. Even the people who ask hard questions.
That’s the power and the beauty of a free press — a principle so sacred to the Founding Fathers that they enshrined it in the very first of all the amendments.
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