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Being a journalist isn't a sure path to popularity.
But we journalists don't go into the profession to make new besties.
Rather, to paraphrase William Shakespeare, we journalists have always suffered the slings and arrows of outraged people, and we still do.
In recent years, however, it seems like individual journalists - not just their newspaper, broadcast or online outlet - are targets of snarky, snide, contemptuous, coarse and sometimes threatening remarks by people and institutions unhappy with how they do their jobs.
President Donald Trump tells a Bloomberg News reporter who is asking him a question, "Quiet. Quiet piggy." He calls an ABC News journalist "a terrible person and a terrible reporter." He demeans somebody from the New York Times as "a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out." And the host of NBC News's Meet the Press, he says, is "either crooked or stupid."
He's not the first president to demean individual journalists, although not as frequently or as vitriolically as Trump.
Among the others was Joe Biden characterizing a Fox News reporter: "What a stupid son of a bitch," for example. And George W. Bush calling a New York Times reporter a "major-league asshole."
All because these journalists were doing what the First Amendment allows them to do: pursue the truth and share what they discover with the public.
One of the best compliments I received during my 20 years as a newspaper reporter came from the late Sen. Joe Mack, a curmudgeonly Democratic lawmaker from Ironwood in the Upper Peninsula:
"You're the god-damnedest liar that ever walked into the Capitol," Mack said while tossing me out of his office.
On one level, that's high praise indeed, given how many liars - elected and not - have traipsed through the Capitol since construction of the building was completed in 1878.
On another level, that remark reflected Mack's outrage at being exposed on the front page of the Detroit News as a greedy crook who swindled the state through phonied-up travel expense accounts, double billing and diversion of taxpayer money for his personal benefit.
Our coverage and a subsequent criminal investigation by the state Attorney General's Office led to a no-contest plea in court and Mack's resignation in disgrace from the Legislature.
When it comes to investigating and disclosing bad behavior - "fraud, waste and abuse" in today's political parlance - by the powerful and influential - reporters should owe no allegiance to any party.
Wrongdoing, incompetence and favoritism are nonpartisan.
Thus I received this compliment from the late Sen. Harry Gast - a Republican from St. Joseph in Southwest Michigan - while I was looking into questionable state contracts. He chaired the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee at the time
"You've got a warped image. You like to crucify someone and let him hang in the sun and rot," Gast told me. "If you get your jollies out of it, keep going."
No, Senator. We don't go into journalism to get our jollies.
However, we can't dismiss personal attacks on individual journalists as mere venting by critics who are disgruntled about a news story or fearful of having their own misdeeds exposed.
Rather, such attacks contribute to a disturbing loss of public confidence in the integrity of the media, a distrust that damages the protections that the First Amendment promises a free press.
Last year, a national Gallup poll found a record-low level of public trust in the press - only 28% among American adults.
This year's Gallup survey results, released in September, show a small improvement, with 33%of U.S. adults saying they have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of confidence in broadcast stations and newspapers to report "fully, accurately and fairly."
Even so, the polling and survey firm said, "Confidence in the media remains near the bottom of Gallup's more than 50-year trend. When Gallup first asked the question in the 1970s, about seven in 10 Americans said they trusted the media."
Speaking recently at Michigan State University, New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger said, "Our work has helped expose miscarriages of justice, save taxpayer dollars and led to lifesaving reforms. But our main purpose has always been to help people of all stripes better understand what's happening and why it matters, to help them engage more deeply with their world."
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and novelist who won a Nobel Prize could have had we journalists in mind when he wrote: "Listen attentively, and above all remember that true tales are meant to be transmitted - to keep them to oneself is to betray them."
No indeed, we're not in it for our jollies. And the stakes for a democratic society are too high to worry about losing our besties.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Eric Freedman is the director of Capital News Service at the MSU School of Journalism.