Thank you once again to the Falls Church City School Board for nominating and then presenting the Falls Church News-Press with yet another Virginia School Boards Association Media Honor Roll recognition last week. The News-Press has been a proud recipient virtually every year since the annual honor was initiated in 2003.
It is heartening to know that the role of an independent media is appreciated in Falls Church, as it has been our mission since our founding in 1991 to enhance the efforts of those who have stood for the development of Falls Church for the sake of the education of its young.
We feel this vision remains vitally important to this globally-exemplary governmental jurisdiction as the wider region has been plunged into what Moody’s is already calling a recession here due to the terminating of so many federal jobs and, consequentially, of federal government contractors. The fallout of this is far from being fully felt yet.
As Falls Church’s newspaper of record, we stand at the ready to participate as fully as we can to alert and notify the public, including the wider public of the wider Northern Virginia region, of as many resources as there are that may be developing to address this crisis. We feel it is important in this context not to downplay the seriousness of the current economic crisis, and to keep an eye on where these trends may be leading. It will be up to our local governments to come up with creative policies to mitigate or offset any negative impacts on behalf of the people they represent.
As one of the Washington, D.C. Metro region’s few remaining print newspapers, we also stand in solidarity with our colleagues in the nation’s capital who are fighting against attempts by the present federal administration to curb their efforts. We are proud of those news organizations covering the Pentagon, for example, who have refused to cow-tow to authoritarian government attempts to do just that by requiring news organizations to sign a pledge that would denude them of their ability to do their jobs.
Refusing to sign that pledge as demanded by the current Defense Secretary have been all but one organization (a shamelessly pro-Trump small outfit). The list of refusers includes ABC News, Air and Space Forces Magazine, Al Jazeera, AL-Monitor, Associated Press, The Atlantic, Aviation Week, Axios, Bloomberg News, Breaking Defense, C41SRNET, CBS News, CNN, The Daily Caller, Defense Daily, Defense News, Defense One, The Economist, Federal Times, The Financial Times, Fox News, The Guardian, The Hill, HuffPost, Military Times, MSNBC, NBC News, The New York Times, Newsmax, National Public Radio, PBS Newshour, Politico, Real Clear Politics, Reuters, Task and Purpose, USNI News, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Post, The Washington Times and WTOP.
Emphatic statements in defense of those who’ve refused have come from the White House Correspondents Association (where we are members) and NPR. We stand foursquare with all those who have refused to back down.
