BY COLLEEN KEANE
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
LAS CRUCES/MESILLA, NM – U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly said and tweeted that journalists are the enemy of America.
Former White House correspondent Sam Donaldson told a roomful of New Mexico reporters and writers last Saturday nothing could be further from the truth.
“No, you are his enemy!” he told the group, many of whom were receiving regional awards that night for stories and books they wrote last year.
Standing tall with that familiar intense gaze, his voice boomed at times in the small banquet room at the La Posta restaurant in Old Mesilla, as he pressed his point.
“You are his enemy by bringing out facts. He understands this. He’s afraid of you. But, don’t be afraid of him and don’t worry what he calls you,” advised Donaldson.
Donaldson was the keynote speaker during the New Mexico Press Women awards banquet.
It was the last event of the two-day annual conference titled “Media Literacy in a Post-Truth Society.”
During his talk, Donaldson underscored that there is no such thing as an “alternative fact,” a reference coined by President Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway.
Digging up facts, reporting and writing about them was a major theme that weaved through the conference that drew about 100 participants, who included journalists, fiction and non-fiction short story writers, children book authors and poets.
To counter the notion of alternative facts, Donaldson stressed, “Be fierce advocates for facts! Facts are stubborn things. They are not amenable to being changed. It is either a fact, or it is not a fact!”
Donaldson was born and raised on a New Mexico ranch in Dona Ana County. He started a career as a news reporter in 1967 that continued steadily for more than four decades.
Working as a White House correspondent, a co-anchor with Diane Sawyer on ABC’s Primetime Live and other news programs, he covered the civil rights movement, Watergate burglaries and hearings, congressional debate on Medicare, the Vietnam war, partisan budget battles (to name some), as they unfolded and interviewed every president from John F. Kennedy to Barack Obama.
Donaldson mentioned he also interviewed Donald Trump on ABC’s Prime Time Live. But that was before Trump ran for president. Questioning Trump on his dwindling assets at the time, Donaldson brought attention to failed business deals sparking the same kind of attacks journalists have been getting during Trump’s campaign and first 100 days in office.
“He called me rude and I was out to get him,” recalled Donaldson.
Prior to the Trump administration, Donaldson looked back on his years on Capitol Hill expressing pride in the U.S. and how it was governed.
“I had the best years. I watched government work because people got together,” he recalled.
Giving an example he mentioned a congressional battle in 1996 under the Clinton administration that ended with a negotiated budget.
Donaldson said lawmakers came up with a joint agreement because they had the best interest of the American people in mind.
Speaking candidly, he noted White House coverage today is a different beat altogether.
He mentioned that today’s coverage is bringing out questions that have probably been asked before, but not as often as they are now.
“There’s a (journalism) debate going on right now on whether or not Donald Trump (or anyone for that matter) should be called a liar when he says something that is obviously not true,” said Donaldson.
“That’s not necessary,” he advised again, bringing up the power of fact gathering and how facts talk for themselves.
Giving an example, he stated, “When Trump said, ‘We have the highest crime rate in this country in 47 years!’ Well, that is not true according to the best evidence that we have, which is FBI statistics. The FBI statistics say we have the lowest crime rate in the last 47 years, except for a bump up in murder rate in 2015.”
A panel of reporters who cover local news and US/Mexico border relations and issues shared ways they dig deep on stories.
“You find these meeting points where ideas could converge. It’s my job to bring meeting points to the surface,” noted panelist Lauren Villagran, southern New Mexico correspondent for the Albuquerque Journal.
To give an example, Villagran shared a story she wrote for the Journal about a conservative rancher who had run-ins with environmentalists. But, they had something in common – neither wanted a wall built on the border.
Historian Yolanda Chavez-Leyva noted that these real life stories counter the narrative coming out of the White House that the border is filled with “bad hombres” and that southern towns are “ground zero.”
“In telling the stories of the people who live at the border, there will be a historical record of the truth,” Chavez-Leyva told her audience.
Chavez-Leyva participated in a panel called La Manda Fronteriza: Standing Firm on the Border-Frontera Truth Telling with award-winning novelist Denise Chavez and author David Romo, son of Mexican immigrants, who writes eloquently about the renaissance of the frontier spirit.
Speaking to the journalists, writers and poets in the audience, Romo advised, “As a human being try to recover the lost stories and fight all the de-humanizing narratives.”
Romo holds a Ph.D. in borderland history.
Chavez, the moderator of the panel, called for everyone to tell their own stories.
“Tell the truth that only you can tell,” she stated.
After his talk on Saturday night, Donaldson, who is 83, gave the dozens of journalists and writers the same parting message.
“It’s up to you now!” he stressed.
The New Mexico Press Women gave awards to authors and journalists in several categories: fiction and non-fiction books, children’s books, news stories and features, to name some.
Several stories published in the Navajo Times were among the communication contest winning entries.
For more information, newmexicopresswomen.org.
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