The enemies list is back, and not a moment too soon. As reporters and editors who came of age in the Nixon era can attest, and as the current generation is learning, nothing fosters moral clarity and a sense of journalistic purpose quite like being declared the enemy by thugs, especially thugs wielding power. Most people who made it onto Nixon’s enemies list considered it an honor, and here we are again nearly 45 years later.

Speaking last week at a gathering of the conservative elite, President Trump denounced journalists whose reporting offends him as “the enemy of the people” — the people presumably being the mystical and mythic Americans of his xenophobic imagination. His press secretary followed up by barring from a daily White House briefing reporters from The New York Times, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the BBC and other outlets.

As far as we can tell, the last time a major political leader employed the term “enemy of the people” was in the Soviet Union under Stalin, when it was applied to both political opponents and rival communists who were targeted for physical liquidation by the regime. Whether Trump is aware of that association is a matter of conjecture, but at the least his use of the term further points to his marked affinity for, and admiration of, authoritarian rule, as expressed, for instance, in his esteem for Vladimir Putin. And authoritarians despise a free press precisely because the continued flow of independent information counters their designs.

Ironically, the proximate cause of Trump’s outburst apparently was a Times story that detailed repeated contacts between Trump associates and Russian intelligence officials in the year leading up to the election (interesting how Russia continues to pop up) and a CNN follow-up reporting that a White House official had asked the FBI to dispute the Times’ account. Even as Trump was bitterly complaining about the use of anonymous sources in such stories, his own aides were holding a press briefing to deny the CNN report — under the cloak of anonymity.

The Washington press corps should find it liberating to know now exactly where it stands. There is absolutely no reason for the mainstream press to waste precious time and resources covering White House briefings. Very little of importance would be lost by ignoring the blather to which the press is subjected in those sessions, and it is especially shortsighted to assign a major news organization’s most accomplished journalists to that task. Their time could be much more fruitfully spent mining their contacts and digging deep into the substance of the administration’s policies and its conduct of government. (We note that The Washington Post did not send a reporter to cover the press briefing from which its brethren were excluded.)

The imperative to probe deep beneath the surface does not apply only to big media outlets. Reporters and editors at all levels need to remind themselves that their constitutionally guaranteed mission is primarily adversarial — to hold government accountable. The radical nature of Trump’s plans is already apparent, and local and regional journalists owe their readers and viewers close scrutiny of the effects of those policies on ordinary people, identifying winners and losers, challenging assumptions and explanations, and impartially reporting the results of their inquiries.  

Mainstream journalists have been preoccupied for many years now with hand-wringing induced by the disruption of the traditional media business model by digital technology. That problem has not yet been solved, but, in the meantime, renewed emphasis on hard-nosed, skeptical, shoe-leather reporting at least would serve to remind them why they went into the business in the first place.

But that’s not the whole story. Producing good, independent journalism is an expensive proposition, and those who value it need to show their support by subscribing to it, by advertising in the outlets where it appears, by reading and listening to it as engaged, critically thinking participants in the great work of democracy. Ultimately, the Fourth Estate can’t perform the role the Founders envisioned without the consumers of conscientiously prepared news upholding their end of the bargain.