Earlier this month, in response to ongoing attacks on the press by the current President of the United States the Boston Globe, organized what can only be called a day of editorial protest.

On Thursday, August 16, the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and hundreds of other papers here in the United States and abroad joined the Globe and published such editorials, condemning what the Globe called "a dirty war against the free press."

The authors of our Constitution considered a free press one of the indispensable bulwarks of Democracy, hence the very First Amendment.

And while no US President has ever been exempt from criticism by the Press, none in our memory has stooped to carrying on what even Great Britain's Guardian described as "a calculated and consistent policy of undermining, delegitimizing and even endangering the press's work."

Echoing the language of some of the 20th century's worst tyrants, the President has attacked individual reporters and encouraged others to do the same using rhetoric that, at times, could be heard as incitement to violence.

He has labeled the press, as an institution, "the enemy of the people."

He has falsely accused newsrooms and reporters of publishing "fake news."

Because we are a monthly publication we could not join the August 16 protest, but we do so now.

Access to news and opinion, on topics national, international, state, regional or intensely local, is not only necessary to our form of Constitutional Democracy but every citizen's right. We intend to do our best to defend that right in this time and place.

Like nearly every newspaper of substance, we have received and ignored our share of threats.

Happily, the vast vast majority of the readers we serve here at the Eccentric, whether conservative, liberal or neutral, treasures the free press.

We are in your debt for that support.

And we promise to do our best to do our duty to live up to the highest standards of journalism.