Some news outlets want the press to unite today and write editorials decrying our president's whine that the media is your enemy.
Other news outlets warn that such editorials - read here, opinions on the opinion pages of your newspaper (which differ from the news pages of your newspaper) - would be playing right into this president's mind-manipulating hands, expecting him to say, "See, the fake news is out to get me."
That's the state of our country today? Really? You don't have the intelligence to watch our president and read your newspaper and watch TV and listen to the radio and form your own opinion? Really?
Well, we have that confidence in you. This writer is a fifth-generation Tennessean, raised in the Southern Baptist Church by a man who worked both a farm and a Chattanooga factory job. She remembers a day back at her parents' dinner table after she was a married working mom when her father, a proud Republican, was railing about how the media was ruining our country.
She put down her fork, took a deep breath, looked at him and said: "Dad, has it occurred to you that I am the media?"
His eyes widened. He put down his glass of iced tea.
"I don't mean you," he said. "I mean the national media."
To him, the national media largely meant Sam Donaldson, who was the loud guy on national television's 6 p.m. newscast shouting questions at political figures - usually the president during the last days of Watergate.
But local reporters are really no different from national reporters, and vice versa. Their coverage areas are different. Local reporters tell you about the workings of police, courts, city, county and state governments in your area, just as national reporters for The Associated Press, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and others - including magazines and The New York Times and The Washington Post, et al - tell you about government in Washington, D.C.
We all tell you what we think you - our parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, sisters, brothers, children, cousins, neighbors and friends - need to know to form your own opinions.
Now let's talk about opinions.
You folks out there in what we call readerland can have all the opinions you want, anytime you want and any way you want, short of violence.
But most media professionals can't - unless they are "editorial writers" on opinion pages like this one and the one to the right.
News writers and editors put their opinions aside and write just the facts, which often boils down to what everyone on that government panel or meeting or incident said and did. Period. Whether they know that what those folks said was true or not.
Repeat. True or not. Council member John Doe said Acme Development should get a zoning change to put 800 new apartment units on a beloved river-side city park area. Council member Jane Doe says John Doe has a financial interest in that deal. That's the classic he-said-she-said news story. Period. Then a good reporter pounds some shoe leather and finds the deeds or contracts or other documentation, or lack thereof, to prove which claim is true - and what's more, identify other political leaders who may be in on the deal, if there is one.
Then this paper's editorial writers, who each spent about four decades being one of those objective reporters or editors, writes an opinion, not objective news, about that zoning plan. We might write that one of those J. Does was less than truthful about this zoning push, and not only should the plan be rejected because the park is important, but that disingenuous council member should be turned out of office because he or she has betrayed the public trust.
Note that phrase "public trust." That's the people's trust. Your trust.
Now let's transfer this example to Washington. We all hold democracy dear. We all respect the presidency, our Congress, our courts and our Constitution. But we also all know, deep in our hearts, that Congress and the president are really no different from our councils and our mayors, our state legislators and our governors. Washington is just a couple of rungs higher on the public trust level.
Based on careful reading of national journalists who are far more skilled than most local reporters in pounding shoe leather, many of our leaders in Washington - and certainly Donald Trump - fail to rise to the trust level.
Trump is president and we should trust him because he was smart enough to become a billionaire, you say? No. We don't know that he's a billionaire because he still hasn't coughed up his tax returns. And if he is, perhaps it's because he grifted his way there with enterprises like the fraudulent Trump University and multiple bankruptcies - even after the quite generous start he got from his rich dad.
Does the fact that journalists report on his recurring broken promises to open his tax returns, or on the untruths he tells every other day make the media the enemy of the people? No. It makes us worried about our country, our democracy. Just like you are. Just like this writer's dad was.
But beware. Trump's 'enemy of the people' talk is working. A plurality of self-identified Republicans - 43 percent - want to give Trump the power to shut down what he deems to be "bad" media.
Don't think he's talking just about the national media.
He's talking about all of the extra eyes and ears of your First Amendment rights - the right of free speech, free press, free assembly, freedom to worship (or not), and freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
We believe you're all smart enough to know who is your real enemy.