Last week was a bad one for the press or, more precisely, for CNN. The network was forced to retract a story posted on its website that a Russian bank, linked to a close ally of President Donald Trump, was under Senate investigation. CNN also issued an apology and three journalists at the network resigned.

This came on the heels of a mistaken report broadcast by CNN in early June about what former FBI Director James Comey planned to say in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Almost immediately, President Donald Trump seized on CNN’s latest misfortune to launch another salvo in his continuing campaign to undercut the news media and especially an outlet he has repeatedly accused of peddling fake news.  The President tweeted, “They caught Fake News CNN cold” and asked, “What about all the other phony stories they do?”

While other journalists came to CNN’s defense for taking responsibility, retracting the story, and forcing the errant reporters to resign, the White House continued to kick one of its favorite foils while it was down.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s deputy press secretary, reacted to CNN’s efforts to make amends by saying, “I don’t know if that response is enough. It’s the barrage of fake news directed at the president that has garnered his frustration … if the media can’t be trusted to report the news, then that’s a dangerous place for America.”

Huckabee Sanders urged Americans to watch a video that showed a CNN producer criticizing his own network. In a chilling and ironic moment, even as she denounced fake news, Sanders told the assembled reporters: “Whether it’s accurate or not, I don’t know, but I would encourage everybody in this room and, frankly, everybody across the country to take a look at it.”

But the problems caused when the press makes mistakes are not just CNN’s problems.

Trump and his spokespeople have regularly pounced on even trivial journalistic mistakes and used them to undermine public confidence in the press. Thus, on the day after his inauguration, the President attacked a Time magazine reporter for erroneously reporting that a bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office even though the reporter had quickly acknowledged and already corrected the mistake the previous day.

As the President put it, “They said that ‘Donald Trump took down the bust — the statue of Dr. Martin Luther King.’ But it was right there…. But this is how dishonest the media is.”

And, in another ironic moment, Sean Spicer tweeted about this same incident: “A reminder of the media danger of tweet first check facts later.”

As much as Trump rails against the press, and even threatens lawsuits, mistakes rarely create legal jeopardy for the press. Celebrated U.S. Supreme Court decisions afford it important protections. News organizations can only be found guilty of libel if they make false statements with “actual malice” and publish a falsehood with “reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”

In addition, the doctrine of “substantial truth” gives legal protection for journalists’ factual inaccuracies so long as “the inaccuracies do not materially alter the substance or impact of what is being communicated.”

However, the current battle between Trump and the press is cultural and political, not legal. The President appears to be winning.

Forty-eight percent of respondents in a recent national survey agreed that reporters have been more negative in their coverage of Trump than they have been of previous administrations. In addition, more people now trust the president than the reporters covering his administration on a daily basis.

Another survey, conducted this May, found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that the mainstream press is full of fake news. This view is held by a majority of people no matter their partisan affiliation.

Putting these views in perspective, the Gallup polling organization notes that “Before 2004, it was common for a majority of Americans to profess at least some trust in the mass media, but since then, less than half of Americans feel that way.”

“Now,” Gallup continued, “only about a third of the US has any trust in the Fourth Estate, a stunning development for an institution designed to inform the public.”

More than fifty years ago President John F. Kennedy expressed a strong belief in the importance of a free press. “No President,” Kennedy said, “should fear public scrutiny of his program…. I am not asking your newspapers to support the administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people … And so it is to the printing press … that we look for strength and assistance, confident that with you will help man will be what he was born to be: free and independent.”

Donald Trump is no John Kennedy. This president calls the press “the enemy of the people.”

In the current moment, when the very future of freedom of the press is at stake, taking responsibility, apologizing, and issuing retractions for mistakes may no longer be enough to insure public respect and support for that freedom.

To avoid errors, the press may be tempted to trim its sails. But that would be the real mistake.

Americans need to understand that we cannot have a press that is worth protecting if it is paralyzed by the fear of making mistakes. CNN’s Jeff Zucker did not get it quite right when he reportedly insisted that reporters need to “play error-free ball.”

There is no such thing as error-free baseball, or journalism, for that matter. In an overheated news environment, the press does need to resist the temptation to chase headlines for their own sake, and journalists need to slow down enough to do their jobs carefully and well. News outlets do need to try to strike a balance in deciding what risks to take in the aggressive pursuit of the news, and readers need to hold the press accountable to tell the truth — and to tell difficult truths as well.

But a free press cannot do its job if it is paralyzed by the fear of making mistakes. And a democracy cannot thrive without a flourishing free press. The real enemies of the people are ignorance, silence, and fear.

Austin Sarat is associate dean of the faculty and William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence & Political Science at Amherst College.

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