Marty Baron Has A Message To Journalists In The Trump Era

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In this article “Washington Post Editor Marty Baron Has a Message to Journalists in the Trump Era” (Remark posted in The Vanity Fair, November 30, 2016), Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post delivers an acceptance speech when he receives the Hitchens Prize in New York (Baron, 2016). In the beginning, Baron introduces prolific polemicist Christopher Hitchens, a respectable journalist to claim that his core values as journalists aim to pursuit the truth, and to hold government to account. Then Baron reviews the conflicts between the president-elect Donald Trump and journalists as well as the Sedition Act of 1798 to encourage nowadays journalists should persist in the ultimate defense of press freedom in journalists’ daily work even though they feel constrained to fight for free express and a free press. Finally, Baron describes his thoughts about the investigation and …show more content…

The Baron’s acceptance speech brings us to the question Lincoln Caplan, senior researcher scholar at Yale Law School about Holmes’s interpretation of the First Amendment. Should we protect freedoms of speech even though we loathe it? Should journalist protect freedoms of press in journalism even though they feel be frightened by threats from the president? The First Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the