As an editor at The Day, several times a year I would receive a telephone call from somebody who wanted to keep his or her name — or the name of a loved one — out of The Day following a drunken driving arrest. Without exception, I said no.

I wasn’t being cold-hearted; I was simply following a fixed rule. You can’t play favorites. I would tell the person on the other end of the line that if an officer stopped me for driving drunk I couldn’t keep my own name out of the police log. Indeed, there was one time the son of a top editor faced a charge of drunk driving. His name appeared in the next day’s edition.

I worked for 35 years at The Day, 28 as a reporter, seven as a supervising editor. I played by the rules. So did my colleagues. Just as a school teacher doesn’t favor a friend of the family over other students, a good journalist abides by basic rules of fairness.

President Trump sees things differently. He has declared that the media are “the enemy of the American people.” This is insulting to a broad swath of journalists who work, day in and day out, to present the facts, as best they know them.

Sometimes that means aggressively pursuing the news. That is when journalism becomes exceptional.

Aggressive journalism disclosed the horrors of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Woodward’s and Bernstein’s disclosures contributed greatly to the forced resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Thomas Farragher, an alum of The Day, went on to the Boston Globe to take part in an investigative team that uncovered the story of the pedophile priests of Greater Boston. The story went national and spurred other investigations, across the globe, into child sexual abuse by priests and the cover-ups by the Catholic Church. The Globe’s aggressive reporting won a Pulitzer Prize.

Taking it to the local level, a diligent free press serves as the watch dog to assure a member of the local Planning and Zoning Commission doesn’t take a bribe to get a project approved or, as reported recently, a public utility cooperative doesn’t use its revenues for lavish junkets and get away with it.

Newspapers are in a tough spot, trapped in a digital age where the Internet is king, advertising revenues are down, and paid readership shrinking. There are 40 percent fewer journalists than a decade ago. Newspapers are endangered. And don’t think for a minute that the Huffington Post or some local blogger is going to keep an eye on that Planning and Zoning Commission or that utility co-op for you.

I was fortunate, for 15 years serving as The Day’s investigative reporter. This means that I, often accompanied by another reporter, was given anywhere from a week to two months to work on a single series of stories, sometimes involving corruption, financial malfeasance or incompetence.

Today, The Day and other newspapers its size find it more difficult to devote such resources to special projects.

Of course, neither newspapers nor their employees are perfect. During the years I worked at The Day I witnessed a handful of ethical lapses. One of them involved a reporter who operated under great pressure to produce several substantial stories on the same day. He invented a feature story, complete with made-up quotes. Day management fired him.

Ethical, professional journalists stand between a fact-based world and the world of “fake news” and “alternative facts.” The Trump era will present the Fourth Estate with a huge task, holding accountable a man whose wild excesses are too numerous to lay out here. The job is Herculean. But if not the media, then who?

Thomas Jefferson was a frequent critic of the press. But in the final analysis, he came down on the side of newspapers being a cornerstone of democracy.

“Were it left to me to decide whether there should be a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter,” he wrote.

Now retired, Stan DeCoster lives in Salem.