Dear People:

I am not your Enemy. I’m not.

Am I human? Of course I am. Sometimes I make mistakes. I strive not to. I double-check, I triple-check, I report and report and fact-check and fact-check and proof and proof and proof — but still, sometimes I make them. Sometimes I misunderstand something or misreport something or misspell something, and when I hear about it afterward, believe me, I beat myself up. I tell my editor, write up a correction, and then I go home fretting over it. I go to bed fretting over it. I wake up at 3 a.m. fretting over it. I spend the next workday fretting over it, and the next workday, and the next, vowing never to make a mistake again.

I am imperfect. But I am not your Enemy.

Do I have biases, preferences, beliefs? Of course I do. Am I subjective? Of course I am. As I admitted above: I’m human. This doesn’t make my work Fake. It doesn’t delegitimize everything I write. It means that I’m aware of my biases and beliefs and strive always to counter them with with balanced reporting. It means that I’m aware of my subjectivity and strive always to counter it with objectivity. It means that I ask questions from every angle, listen hard to every answer, then do my best to piece the answers together in a fair and full and accurate story.

This is what journalists do: ask, then listen, then tell.

This is what journalists believe: that the telling matters.

What we do isn’t easy, and maybe it doesn’t pay so well, either. But we do it because we’re curious, and we do it because we we care, and we do it because we like being in newsrooms filled with curious people who care.

If you’ve worked in journalism long enough, you’ve gotten a threatening letter, email or phone call. I have. Everyone has. Reporters periodically piss people off; that’s just a fact. Sometimes it happens when we get things wrong. Sometimes it happens when we get things right.

But Trump’s every reference to the “Enemy of the People” scares me. It scares me because the phrase reduces an entire population of well-meaning, hard-working, admittedly somewhat frumpy professionals to a class of depraved and cynical scumbags scheming to undercut the American way of life.

And we’re not. I mean it: We’re not. You want to know the truth? We love this country. We revere its founding principles, and I don’t just mean the First Amendment; I mean all of it. Widespread and longstanding stereotypes to the contrary, journalists aren’t actually cynics. Journalists are skeptical idealists, people who’ve seen it all and question everything but still want to believe in something greater. Why would any of us be in this business if we didn’t? Why would we care enough to stay?

We are not your enemy.