We are the enemy.

That’s what the president said of “the media” — and really, if nothing else, we need to discuss the all-encompassing idiocy of that label sometime.

But now isn’t the time, because right now we need to discuss the continued attacks from the highest office in the country on the profession that is meant to hold him and all other elected officials accountable.

The media.

Because two days after the president of the United States stood in front of a crowd and TV cameras and pointed at the reporters covering his rambling, bumbling speech, and told everyone that those people are “the enemy,” a guy went into a newsroom in Maryland and shot dead five journalists.

Now, maybe there is and maybe there isn’t a direct correlation between the two things — there is currently small pieces of evidence pointing in both directions.

But the climate created by Trump and promoted by the state-run media outlet at Fox News and on conservative outlets certainly hasn’t helped.

And before you crank up the whataboutism machine, no, progressive voters heckling and protesting elected officials and cabinet members is not even in the same universe as the president of the country labeling a group of people as an enemy to the country. If you can’t comprehend this, find yourself a snow shovel and whack yourself in the forehead until it sinks in.

It’s easy to understand why those conservative outlets spend so much time insisting that the mainstream media is biased. Because it’s the only way to make their channel digestible.

The average Fox viewer knows that what comes spewing out of that channel is mostly completely biased garbage. But they justify it by convincing themselves that all of the other outlets are biased too.

And they set up fake tests to prove it. Sure, Hannity lied 14 times in his first segment tonight, but ABC had to correct a report last month and NBC fired an anchor for fabricating a story 25 years ago.

See, all of them are biased.

From there, it’s a small step to believing the president when he insists over and over and over again that the media are liars and evil and very bad people and the real enemy of the country.

And dopey Americans buy it.

That’s right, I said “dopey.” Because you have to be on the fifth level of stupid to believe that media outlets with standards and ethics and editing and accountability are somehow part of this grand conspiracy to bring down Trump or Republicans or conservativism.

If you spent 15 minutes in any newsroom in America, you’d leave with no doubt that the reporters not only aren’t following some secret liberal directive, they’re usually not following any directives at all.

What they are doing is covering your town’s council meetings and school board meetings and court hearings and police investigations. They’re giving you the inside story of the economic development deals and exposing corruption and misdeeds. They’re covering your kids’ sports teams and your favorite college’s athletic programs. They’re out in the community every single day, talking to the people who make the place go and learning all they can about the things you care about.

And yes, they also publish editorials and columns in clearly designated areas that provide informed opinions on matters of interest.

Instead of celebrating that source of valuable information, so many people on the right want it torn down. Because too often facts — they have a liberal bias, you know — get in the way of their personal beliefs. Or because those reporters’ stories and facts and historical knowledge get in the way of their goals of corruption and malfeasance.

That’s why Trump and today’s GOP so badly hate the real media. Because every day, those folks are out there reporting the truth, calling him out when he lies repeatedly, correcting his ignorant “facts” and cutting through the nonsense to provide the country with an accurate report on matters that affect them.

In that sense, I guess the media is, technically, the enemy.

Not of the country. Not of the American people.

The American mainstream media is the enemy of corruption, corrupt people, liars and those who wish to sell out the people in exchange for personal wealth and glory.

Print this piece

Reporting death is never easy.

There is no good way to do it. There is no right question to ask. There is inevitably the feeling that you, as an outsider, are intruding upon a situation that you cannot fully appreciate because you are not dealing with the loss and pain.

But make no mistake: Reporting on death is one of the responsibilities of a news reporter.

That is particularly true in the case of public officials and their families. And it is even truer when those deaths involve unusual circumstances.

That is why on Tuesday, media outlets, starting with al.com, began to report the details of the death of Bridgette Marshall, wife of Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall.

The details in those stories were not particularly graphic. The details were not sensationalized. All of the details were simply copied from the public police report prepared by the Murfreesboro (Tenn.) Police Department.

Oddly, the attorney general, a former county district attorney, doesn’t seem to understand this fairly common practice that occurs following thousands of deaths each year.

At least, he didn’t seem to understand it when he opened his press conference on Wednesday by vilifying al.com for its story on Bridgette Marshall’s death. A report was written more than two days following her death, and almost exclusively quoting from the police report.

“I watched my daughter read a reckless article last night that disclosed the circumstances of how Bridgette died,” Marshall said, after noting that he was being “forced” to hold the news conference to address rumors.

How the story was “reckless,” I’m not sure. I’m also not sure why Marshall’s daughter, a 22-year-old who he said was a month away from being married, did not know the very basic details contained in that story.

If we’re being fair here, the media has been more than respectful to the Marshall family during this awful situation. For 48 hours, despite solid information from solid sources, state media outlets didn’t press the official line from the AG’s office — that Bridgette Marshall died after a struggle with mental illness.

But we certainly could have.

There was not one single piece of information handed out by Marshall at Wednesday’s press conference — a press conference where he laid bare all of his late wife’s struggles with addiction, health and mental illness — that we didn’t know before lunch on Sunday. Right down to what was said during the phone call between them.

APR held all of that back out of respect for the family, waiting to see what would be contained in the forthcoming police report. And we allowed the police report to dictate just how much we reported.

Because those reports are public information and are routinely reported by news outlets. Each time you see the details of a homicide or a death investigation, that information, more likely than not, came from a police report or coroner’s report.

And those reports are made public for a few reasons — to assure accountability and in the interest of public health and safety. For example, if a person dies of a gunshot wound, the public has an interest in knowing if it was self-inflicted or possibly murder, and what reasons the police had for making their determinations.

Basically, we, as a society, decided a long time ago that the benefit to the public of providing the basic details of a person’s death outweighs whatever privacy concerns the reports might bring.

It’s inconceivable that Steve Marshall isn’t aware of this, so maybe Wednesday’s outrage was less about the reporting and more about his personal grief. Maybe that’s a bit more understandable.

But let’s be clear about two things: no one in the media wronged Marshall or his family by reporting the facts of wife’s death. And no one in the media took any joy about reporting those facts.

Print this piece

Many years ago, back in the last century, I was writing editorials in Alabama supporting a program known as Children First. There was plenty of opposition.

But Children First eventually passed, and while the ultimate credit goes to the Alabama Legislature, many good women led the effort for our state to do better by its children. Former Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb was the point of the spear. The late Sandra Ross Storm, at the time presiding judge at Jefferson County Family Court, did more than her part.

A group of juvenile judges came up with the idea. They saw potential, but little hope of continued funding for children’s programs.

Even so, it took five hard years, from 1995 to 2000, to pass the program, and only then because it was going to be paid for by the national tobacco settlement. Truth is, many of the men who voted for Children First, which was contingent on funding from that tobacco settlement, never believed there would be a tobacco settlement.

But there was a settlement, and a vital program to help kids was born.

It wasn’t only women who helped: John Hall, an attorney and one-time adviser to Gov. Don Siegelman, was instrumental, along with the late Jim Hayes, another Siegelman aide. Marshall County Circuit Judge Howard Hawk, a lawmaker at the time, led the fight in the Legislature.

Indeed, the battle for Children First started when former Gov. Fob James was in office. James fought the program, as did the heavily male-dominated Alabama Legislature. The Gary Palmer-led Alabama Family Alliance fought the program. Yes, the same Gary Palmer who now is a U.S. representative for Alabama’s Sixth District.

Even as survey after survey showed that many of Alabama’s children, especially its poor children, were living marginal lives — often hungry, poorly educated, with little access to quality health care or other services — men, mostly, fought against Children First.

Children First and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (All-KIDS in Alabama) put our state on the map for at least doing something positive and progressive for the kids.

Now, the Republican (and male)-dominated Legislature tries to take money from the program each year. The national CHIP program is the target of President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans.

Children First supporters cannot rest. Ever.

Even way back then, in the mid-1990s through my leaving the newspaper in 2015, I wrote about the need for more women in the Alabama Legislature and in Congress. I still believe that, and perhaps this year is the year we’ll see a change.

Women candidates, especially Democratic Party women, are doing well in primaries across the state and nation.

In Alabama, a record number of women Democrats are running for positions, from statewide positions down to local offices. Most of these are African-American women.

Do not sell them short.

The reason U.S. Sen. Doug Jones was successful in his December race against former Chief Justice and child molester Roy Moore was because of the turnout of women voters and, mainly, black women voters.

Not that Republican women don’t bring important issues to the table. Sue Bell Cobb is a Democrat, and recently lost her party’s nomination for governor to Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox. But Judge Sandra Storm was a Republican.

Many people, especially women, don’t have much faith in Republican women like Gov. Kay Ivey or Lt. Gov. candidate Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh, because they supported Moore simply because he is a Republican. Ivey admitted she believed Moore’s accusers, yet still voted for the molester.

Not even longtime GOP U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby did that.

We need more women in the state Legislature and in Congress because women help change the conversation. They help change the priorities. They help bring positive and progressive change on issues often ignored or shuffled aside by men.

Men, generally, are more concerned with asphalt, and guns, and economic development at any price.

Women, generally, are more concerned with education, and child welfare, and health care at any price.

I’ll take the latter any day.

That’s not at absolute, of course. Some men care about nurturing issues; some women don’t. But, generally, the atmosphere in any legislative body – local, state, or national – changes with the more women who take part in the decision-making.

So, again, Alabama voters have a chance to change the conversation. Study the candidates who are running. Some women are much more qualified than the men they’re running against. Some men are much more qualified than the women they’re running against.

But when there’s a race where the qualifications are pretty much equal, vote for the woman.

Women will make the difference.

Joey Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winner, writes this column ever week for Alabama Political Reporter. Email: [email protected]

Print this piece