I always knew that I loved to write, but I didn't know how much I loved journalism until we learned about the Progressive Era in middle school. We read passages about muckrakers: people who leaked wrong-doings by businesses in order to show the public what was really going on behind closed doors.
I had the utmost respect for them — I wanted to be like them.
I knew, though, that being a journalist could be a dangerous profession. If I traveled for work, investigated, got put into war zones, it could put my life in danger. I've since backed off from pursuing journalism as a career (mostly in part to the way my ideas for my future have shifted), but Donald Trump just waged war on whistleblowers, and that infuriates me.
He can call honest news "fake." Fine. He can disagree with the media because they're putting him in a bad light. I get it. But he can't wage a war on the core of journalism, and he can't hide things from the country that he's supposed to be running. But he has, and he is, and that's what whistleblowing is here to expose.
According to the Huffington Post, "Trump is hardly the first president to want to clamp down on leaks and whistleblowing. His predecessor was particularly aggressive in going after news outlets for publishing sensitive information. But whereas Barack Obama’s efforts centered around protecting policy secrecy, Trump’s main priority seems to be protecting himself."
These leaks that are coming from the White House weren't done as a personal attack on Mr. Trump. They weren't done with the intention to defame his character (whatever character he has left). The leaks were exposed so that the American public —his country — would know what was going on in our current government. With a president who's lying to us about many things, from the size of his inauguration to his relationship with Vladimir Putin, someone has to expose the truth.
And I'm (not) sorry, but trying to punish journalists and silence the media infringes on the First Amendment — especially since the freedom of the press is protected by said amendment.
What we're left with when we suppress the media, when we punish people for disagreeing with our beliefs, when we lie about the popularity of the bans we impose, is a country headed toward a dictatorship.
The U.S. is officially a flawed democracy, a country "weighed down by weak governance, an underdeveloped political culture and low levels of political participation." Now more than ever, it's important for us to get politically involved. It's important for us to stand up for what we believe in and fight or what we believe is right. And in order to do that to the best of our ability, we need the muckrakers and the whistleblowers. They're the people who will give us the facts we can't see, the facts we aren't allowed to see.
Maybe, just maybe, that's why the government wants to take them out.
