Newsrooms sticking to our knitting

Good advice often comes from trite phrases - they become trite by being so apt, you know - and that's the case with the admonition, "Stick to your knitting." In a way, that's what your local newspaper is all about.

Our knitting, which is to say the work at hand in our newsroom, is mainly keeping an eye on what's happening in our community and our state, with a glance at the most important national and global news, too. It's not that we ignore Capitol Hill and the White House and points beyond, especially on our opinion pages, but that's not our first priority, because there are plenty of places you can get that news. For deep local coverage, though, you have to come here.

I don't suggest this as a commercial for the Times Union, really; it's more to frame what we've been doing during the first year of the controversial, tumultuous presidency of Donald J. Trump. On the anniversary of his inauguration, it's appropriate to weigh what we've been doing because we're part of that gang the president purports to detest, the mainstream media. In the president's eyes, we're "the enemy of the people," the phrase he (surely unknowingly) lifted from Josef Stalin.

In the year that Donald Trump has been president, the phrase "fake news" has been bandied about a lot, and now you hear some people mimicking Trump, using the term for any reporting they don't like.

But it's not fake news to reveal, as the Times Union did last year, that a handcuffed woman's head was split open when Schenectady cops slammed it on a bench in the police station, without accusing her of a crime. The woman was then left bleeding on the floor in a hallway, as officers turned away. That's real news, not fake news, and you had a right to know about it.

It's not fake news that a local doctor has overseen the branding of a cluster of women - not tattooing, mind you, but branding - with the initials of the leader of a locally based organization called NXIVM, which is often described as either a self-help group or a dangerous cult. That really happened, as did an odd brain-activity experiment undertaken by a different NXIVM-connected doctor that involved showing women terrifying images of murder, rape and mutilation. That sounds to me like real news.

It's not fake news that the Milton Town Board concealed a harassment complaint against the former town supervisor, who then lied when a Times Union reporter asked him about it. The truth of our reporting was affirmed when a judge unsealed a settlement in which the town agreed to pay the woman tens of thousands of dollars and get her a job in Saratoga County government. (In fact, she got no job.)

And it's not fake news that at least three women have alleged that they were victims of physical abuse at the hands of the mayor of Cohoes, Shawn Morse. He has denied the allegations, but I don't know any reputable journalist who wouldn't consider the claims both serious and newsworthy.

It's by sticking to our knitting that this newspaper has reported all those stories, and a lot more, over the past year. That's our job, and we will keep doing it, no matter the outraged claims of some people that you shouldn't trust what you read here. I stand on our record of veracity.

These stories are examples of what one news organization has done during a year that the American president has been attacking the nation's news media relentlessly. Journalists, Trump said last summer, are "sick people ... liars." Those people, all over the country, have spent the first year of the Trump presidency doing exactly what this newspaper has done: reporting news that matters to their readers, viewers and listeners.

As somebody who has studied the media deeply as well as worked in the field for four decades, I'm convinced that the journalists covering the White House, far from lying about the president, are doing on their beat exactly what reporters here are doing: trying to give citizens an honest picture of what they find, even if it makes them unpopular with people who care more about propping up their own biases than learning the truth.

What's tragic is that the president's constant denigration of the press may be working. A poll last fall found that nearly half of American voters believe that the news media fabricate stories about Trump. It's not a big step from that to supporting government restrictions on the press. A constitutional amendment to allow such control shouldn't be seen as an impossibility, at least not during this administration.

That would put at risk not only truth-telling about the White House, but also what we report locally. I hope that troubles you, because a society can't be free unless its press is. For us in the newsroom, it means we need to get back to our knitting.

Rex Smith is editor of the Times Union. Share your thoughts at http://timesunion.com/rex_smith.