Whom can you trust?

Former Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly this week told sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt that journalists are out to divide the country, to create and sow chaos.

“Because the media has an agenda and the agenda that they have depends on which side of the political aisle they sit, and I’m sorry that’s the way the country is now, but it’s the truth, and so they use it to divide us and embarrass the Navy,” Modly said. “They use it to embarrass you.”

President Donald Trump accepted Modly’s resignation a day after his comments, but not because he mischaracterized the work of journalists. After all, President Trump himself has a tenuous relationship with journalists, generally praising those from clearly partisan conservative news media and castigating those from more mainstream nonpartisan organizations.

Make no mistake, trust in the media is low. And some journalists have earned that distrust through sloppy reporting, conflicts of interest and general indifference.

You cannot discount, however, the coordinated campaign since the mid-1960s — specifically Roger Ailes’ life work — to sow that distrust by pushing the “media agenda” canard as hard as they possibly can.

The result is that in times like these, when hard-working journalists in every town and city  — including student journalists — are literally risking their lives to present complete and truthful stories, fully half the population won’t believe what they read or hear because faith has been eroded in nonpartisan journalism, not just by those journalists themselves, but by cynical politicians and pundits, both liberal and conservative.

Believe what you will, and by all means be skeptical about everything you read, but cynicism about our friends and colleagues— and you — is painful and damaging to our democratic republic.

So how can you help rebuild that trust in a nonpartisan press, to help the public understand that you aren’t in this to prove any point or to support liberalism, conservatism, Republicans, Democrats, Greens, Libertarians or Socialists? That you’re not out to divide people, but to unite them in a community that cares about the people in that community?

Start with a statement of purpose that clearly states your raison d’etre and then share that statement with your audiences.

Need help crafting that statement? Look no further than the eight guiding principles of Quill and Scroll for help.

• We seek the TRUTH in what we do, and if we learn at some point that we were wrong, we’ll apologize and correct that error.
• To that end, we are always LEARNING about the world around us. We will not be so arrogant as to think we have the answers to anything until we do the required research and investigation.
• We embrace our LEADERSHIP role in our schools and in our communities, and we take seriously the work that we do to help people make sense of their lives and the world around them.
• We are LOYAL, but not to a political philosophy or any individual person, but to the democratic ideal that free people use news to make informed decisions.
• We take INITIATIVE in order to develop our stories, learning from our fellow citizens and others about the issues that trouble and delight them.
• We practice INTEGRITY in our news gathering and presentation, leaning on tools like the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics to guide us.
• We use our best JUDGMENT about both what to publish and what not to publish, making sure that we understand the stories that will keep our neighbors informed.
• And we remember that FRIENDSHIP is our ultimate goal, creating a better community, one in which its members embrace each other’s humanity while rejecting prejudice and hatred.

Do that, and you’ll live up to journalism’s highest ideals and to Quill and Scroll’s founders’ vision, established 94 years ago today.