In the first Saturday Night Live monologue following the presidential inauguration of 2017, Aziz Ansari joked about the people “who were like, as soon as Trump won, ‘We don’t have to pretend like we’re not racist anymore!’”

The punchline: “If you’re one of those people, please go back to pretending…. We never realized how much effort you were putting into the pretending but you got to go back to pretending.”

This joke worked for many reasons, but one of them speaks to a problem that has only become worse since 2017, the breakdown of the tried and true rules of civil discourse. As both news and opinion have shifted to social media platforms, important standards of politeness seem to have waned on some occasions, to put it mildly.

It’s all the more important that the official press, the source of fact-checked news rather than just opinion, hold firm to its important role in forging civil discourse.

First, objective news and personal opinions need to be firmly delineated. And across all its forms, “politeness,” basic civility, is crucial. It may be pretending, at least some of the time, but it is the pretense upon which a civilization is founded.

To be polite is to be a member of the polis, the ancient Greek word for the city state. Politeness shares a root with politics, policy, and police.

As a creator of civil discourse, a newspaper, like any standard-bearing community institution — whether the county council, a community center, a church, or a school, must uphold the rules of politeness. It must model civility to the citizens it addresses. Disagreement need not be accompanied with insult. Finding, and creating, common ground is the quickest avenue to understanding. Respect is an absolute necessity.