Sometimes reporters need some cheering up.  Sometimes the public needs a view from inside the profession.   The person who wrote an editorial called, “The Life of a Newspaper Man” published in the Jefferson City Daily Democrat-Tribune more than a century ago might have been thinking along those lines when this appeared in the May 5, 1912 edition:

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With the job of the newspaper man travels a silent companion. Trouble is his name and Worry is his sister.  Seven days out of six old man Trouble is on the job and the rest of the time his sister looks after his interest.  The newspaper man is between the devil and the deep blue sea during his waking hours and the chances are that his dreams are disturbed by gaunt specters of the day’s events.

If he asks questions he is impertinent, and if not he does not know his business. If he is observant, he is nosey and if not, he cannot deliver the goods.  If he hangs around he is in the way and if not something is sure to happen while he is away.  He must depend on others for information and if he does they forget to tell him.  If he honors official requests to suppress that story about Bill Jones because Bill’s first wife was a second cousin of a dear friend of Soandso, he is a good fellow, but he is not doing his duty to his paper or to the public.  He depends on the official for his information, but he depends also on the paper for his salary. If he suppresses the story he is looking for another job and if he does not he does not get the news.

A preacher in Los Angeles once delivered a violent sermon in which he denounced the newspapers and all of those connected with them as liars and crooks.  The next day they offered him the city editor’s desk of one of the great dailies in order that he might see the conditions under which a newspaper was made.  He held down the desk two hours and then made a public apology, saying that men who would work day in and day out under such a strain as did the staff of a newspaper were almost inhuman and due allowance should be made if they made mistakes.

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That was in the days before radio and television news and certainly before the days of cable television and internet punditry.  In 1981, your correspondent was part of a group that heard Walter Cronkite, the Missouri boy who became “the most trusted man in America” tell his colleagues in the electronic journalism business:

“What a THING it is to be a journalist.  God almighty; that’s the greatest thing in the world–to be a journalist. And there’s something wrong in this damn business of ours when there are too many people coming into it not to be journalists but to be a success, whatever the devil that means.

“I think there’s only one success in life for anybody who’s got the heart, compassion and courage to be a journalist, and that’s to be a journalist.

“…It worries me that in our communications schools we’re teaching how to communicate rather than how to be newspeople.

“It takes courage to be a journalist. It takes a courage that the public doesn’t know a damn thing about.  Not the courage to go out and face bullets and rocks and stones and shards of glass and the explosions of a terrorist bomb in a civil insurrection or a war.  That’s simple courage.  That’s macho courage.  That’s foolhardy courage at times.  It’s needed, and we’re certainly not going to deny the heroes their awards for that.

“But there are a lot of other kinds of courage it takes in this business.  It takes a kind of courage to face the ostracism of one’s neighbors, one’s friends, one’s golf companions on the 19th hole; when one is willing to get out there and say what’s right, what they know is right, and what they know must be reported to that community, to that state, if the nation is to live, and they’ll tell it, no matter what the fallout in their own social arrangement may be.”

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It’s not easy to be a journalist, whether print or electronic, in a time of division and an era where mistrust in our democratic institutions—including the press—is cultivated.

It is not easy for the journalist who is painted with the same broad public brush whether he or she works for a supermarket tabloid, gossip magazine, or for the New York Times and the Washington Post.

It is not easy to be a reporter in an era that encompasses Access Hollywood, The Daily Show, radio talk, 60 Minutes and the PBS Newshour and know that the public image of “the media” often lumps them together. But I’ve been in places where the journalist is not free to face the kind of public criticism or to face the limited public acclaim that American journalists face.

One of the many important penalties we have to pay as a free society is an aggressive, courageous press that is free to ask serious accountability questions to and about those to whom we have given power and to report the answers—with which we are free to disagree.  Say what you will about the press, but be grateful we live in a country that has a free one.

You could be someone hearing the Russian media version of what is happening in Ukraine.