Sending an “open letter” to President Trump has been in vogue these days.

Social activists, business moguls, media chieftains and political leaders all have penned a multitude of them since the November election. Some offer advice, some raise alarms, some offer praise and some just convey insults.

All well and good — those exchanges and more are in the “free speech and free press” ethos protected by the First Amendment of speaking “truth to power” — even if the response from Trump more often and not has been to vigorously tar unfavorable messages as “untruth.”

So this moment in history is just too ripe not to join in, but with a twist: Here’s my open letter about our core freedoms of speech, press, assembly, petition and religion… as a note not to the new commander in chief, but to the rest of us — “We, The People.”

For those reveling today in Trump’s oath of office, take a moment to consider that the freedoms of speech and press which he seems to be targeting were in no small way vital to a campaign rooted in reaching out to those who felt marginalized, ignored or even betrayed by both major parties.

Trump’s ongoing “fireside tweets” are both new to American politics and an echo of FDR’s similar mastery of the new medium of his era, radio, to speak directly to voters. He and we need to keep in mind that loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue a reporter also will make it easier to mount a legal challenge to all of us — including Trump — over our online comments.

And then there’s Trump’s biting, emotional indictments of the news media. More than 60 news and free press organizations earlier this week sent a multi-page note to the President and Vice President Pence, asking for a meeting to discuss transparency and press access to their administration.

We, the people, should endorse that call to coverage by our independent “watchdogs on government.” In turn, journalists must take action to reverse a widespread view — 74% in the latest State of the First Amendment survey — that the news media is failing to live up to its responsibility to be accurate and unbiased in news reports — or to, at the least — be transparent in declaring bias.

Holding government accountable in public for how public policy is made, and how public funds are spent, would seem to be a non-partisan objective we can all agree on. In that same SOFA survey, 71% of us said that was the case.

We will need to keep in mind as a nation that discussion, dissent, disagreement and debate are the hallmarks of a strong and open system of self-governance — and provide the means for self-correction when this nation goes astray. Let’s consider how rare it is in the world to be able to peaceably assembly without fear of government persecution or prosecution, to petition the government for change.

In like manner, there may be those who decry the “Women’s March” that will follow the Inaugural parade by one day as divisive. But what a grand example to other nations: Hundreds of thousands of Americans on one day, celebrating the peaceful transition of national power after a heated, closely contested election — only to be followed a single day later, in the same space, by hundreds of thousands of Americans protesting the political particulars of that transfer.

And finally, there’s certainly every reason to fear domestic and international terrorists. But we need to remember that targeting others solely because of their Muslim religious faith not only violates our nation’s unique commitment to respecting all faiths, but resurrects images of a time when unjustified wartime fear and disgraceful ethnic bias led us to intern Japanese Americans at the start if WWII.

More than ever, as we enter this new “Era of Trump,” we should heed the call to duty as citizens expressed in the observation by my late colleague John Seigenthaler that “our First Amendment freedoms are never safe, never secure, but always in the process of being made safe and secure.”

We may disagree — and often do — on how those five core freedoms of the First Amendment apply to any given set of facts.

But we should all stand behind them against any attempt to limit, weaken or ignore them on the basis of the variable political winds, the power of fear — or even the impact of the occasional Presidential tweet.

Gene Policinski is chief operating officer of the Newseum Institute and senior vice president of the Institute’s First Amendment Center. [email protected]

The Thunderbolt was a publication of the American Nazi Party. I saw my first copy my first year of teaching in rural Kentucky in 1969. Before class, a high school student showed me a copy, careful that no classmates were nearby. The feature story was an outrageous claim that African-Americans were more closely related to gorillas because they could produce hybrids and white Aryans could not. The article had a picture of a very hairy black infant to “prove” the case.

I recognized the picture. I wrote the term “hirsutism” on a slip of paper and sent the student to the library with instructions to look it up in the World Book encyclopedia. When he came back, after class was over he came up and whispered: “They lied, didn’t they.” I nodded. He had found the encyclopedia entry on the wide range of infants that have this rare hirsute condition and realized how the neo-Nazis had fabricated their racist article.
We did not use the term “fake news” in 1969. We had fake news, but it was slow to spread in print, and readership was small.

Today with social media, such fake news could “go viral” overnight.

Today, both K–12 and higher education are rushing to battle fake news with so-called “information literacy” courses that have magic cures for detecting the range of amateurish didn’t-quite-get-the-story-right misinformation to vicious falsehoods, such as the example above.

Librarians are often called upon to sort truth from trash. That is ironic because before the internet, library materials were classified: 500s and 600s were the pure and applied sciences. The occult was in the 100s. But our misunderstanding of free speech has kept the internet free from classification. How dare anyone put vaccines-cause-asthma or dolphins-are-just-underwater-humans in the non-sciences.

So the internet has become a vast wasteland. I let my student teachers discover this themselves. I assign them to find 10 accurate websites on the internet in some specific biology field that they choose: kidneys, ferns, fish, etc. They think it will be an easy assignment, but it takes hours or even days. They have over 40 credit hours of biology under their belts and they detect website after website that looks good—until they read the details. Tips on search words and other literacy tricks have little effect. A study in the journal Pediatrics found the majority of online information on childhood diarrhea was wrong, and sometimes fatal. Dot.gov and dot.edu sites are no more accurate than dot.com addresses.

A most damning piece of research came from the University of Connecticut. Seventh grade students were taught to become “research pros” by using RADCAB®, a “critical thinking assessment tool for online information” teaching about Relevance, Appropriateness, Detail, Currency, Authority and Bias.

The Connecticut study directed students to use RADCAB on the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus website. The students found that the Tree Octopus website passed all the tests for authority, citations and other criteria (the PhDs and journals were fake, however). But when an actual expert was brought in to explain how the octopus only lives in the sea, nearly all of the students rejected the expert. They now had “ownership” of this falsehood.

This would not have happened if the students had actually known something about an octopus. To combat fake information in the future, citizens are just going to have to know more content.

To return to the Neo-Nazi Thunderbolt article I described at the beginning, my ability to de-fuse that terrible lie came directly from my having read through the World Book encyclopedia in fifth grade and then recognizing the picture over a decade later. Without that knowledge and our unique ability to recall faces and photos for long times, I would have had to resort to an authoritative “believe me” explanation that would not have undermined the legitimacy.

Abstract “information literacy” lessons don’t work. If there was any god-like truth-detector, we would all be using it.

Simply, any assertion that schools can teach students a method to separate truthful reporting from fake news, is itself “fake news.”