Distinguished media lawyer Bruce Sanford sat down with SMU-TV and The Daily Campus prior to this year’s Sammons Lecture in Media Ethics to discuss low trust in the media and how President Donald J. Trump’s criticism of the media has become an easy excuse for the media’s fall.

“The public’s opinion of the media is at a historic low,” Sanford said under the lights of the Tony Pederson Studio in the Division of Journalism. “It is easy for the media to blame President Trump for these ratings, but the truth is that the public’s distrust was there before the Trump administration.”

Sanford’s lecture on Tuesday was titled “Trusting the Media in the Age of Trump.”

Sanford, a lawyer with the D.C. law firm Baker Hostetler, has a unique perspective on the media and its interactions with the public due to his career path. He started off as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, before deciding to go back to school and get his law degree from New York University.

“I wanted to participate in problem solving, and through being a lawyer I get to represent journalists and the media,” Sanford said about his decision to practice law.

The short interview ended with Sanford’s thoughts on the First Amendment and libel laws. He noted that the Supreme Court says that journalists need a certain amount of space to get things wrong.

“As long as there are no ill intentions, journalists will sometimes get things wrong in the search to uncover the truth,” Sanford said.

He believes that if libel laws were voted on in present day people would be more hesitant to vote for them, but they allow journalists to do their job.