EVEN before he was elected President in November 2016, the words “fake news” were never far from Donald Trump's lips. And as the numbers roll over to mark his first year in the job, it isn't hard to see why they still make the journey from his mouth to our ears with such monotonous regularity: because it's the free press that is doing the best job of opposing him, in particular those old warhorses of investigative journalism The New York Times and The Washington Post. And Trump doesn't like it one little bit.

Citing those two papers, as well as the news-gathering arms of CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC, Trump has referred to American journalists as “the enemy of the people”, which Stalinist rhetoric brought a stinging rebuke from Republican Senator Jeff Flake last week in a speech chastising Trump and the White House for its “unrelenting daily assault on the constitutionally-protected free press”. Invoking the words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence as well as those of the late Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan – “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion,” he once said, “but not to his own facts” –  Flake scourged Trump for his “shameful, repulsive statements” and warned of the deleterious effect they were having on American democracy.

Flake's words have been widely reported but they bear repeating: “The President has it precisely backward – despotism is the enemy of the people. The free press is the despot's enemy, which makes the free press the guardian of democracy. When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn't suit him 'fake news', it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press.”

It isn't just Jeff Flake who has rallied to the side of the press. The New York Times, almost always described as “failing” by President Trump, added 276,000 digital subscribers in the final quarter of 2016 and now has more than three million subscribers across its print and online editions. The Washington Post, whose circulation dropped 39 per cent between 2009 and 2015 to a mere 633,100, saw a record number of digital subscriptions taken out in November 2016 and then had even that record smashed in January 2017, the month Trump took office. Digital subscriptions alone have now passed the one million mark.

Last week, Trump made his ham-fisted announcement of his Fake News Awards and it was no surprise that The Washington Post and The New York Times featured in it, along with other famously dubious news sources such as Time Magazine and Newsweek. So what's the take-away from that, as they say? Simply this: that the free press, and in particular the scoops and exclusives it provides, are vitally important to the functioning of democracy.

As luck would have it, last Friday saw the release of The Post, Steven Spielberg's re-telling of another press v president dust-up, this one involving the publication of the so-called Pentagon Papers in June 1971 by both The New York Times and The Washington Post. Leaked to the papers by military analyst Daniel Ellsberg, the top secret documents revealed the extent of the US military's operations in Vietnam and showed that the administration of Lyndon B Johnson had lied to Congress and the American public.

“The level of urgency to make the movie was because of the current climate of this administration, bombarding the press and labelling the truth as fake if it suited them,” Spielberg said in an interview in The Guardian ahead of last week's release. “I deeply resented the hashtag ‘alternative facts’, because I’m a believer in only one truth, which is the objective truth.”

With that in mind, here are 10 more stories of journalistic endeavour – ones that not even Donald Trump could describe as “fake news”.

J'Accuse!

Not exactly a scoop, but the open letter published in French newspaper L'Aurore on January 13, 1898, in which eminent author Emile Zola attacked the state for anti-Semitism and the unlawful imprisonment of army officer Alfred Dreyfus, had an effect as electrifying as any front-page splash. Dreyfus had been accused of spying for the Germans, though the evidence was flimsy: but he was Jewish, which made him guilty in the eyes of many. Zola himself was prosecuted for criminal libel as a result of his actions, and fled to the UK. However Dreyfus was eventually pardoned and, in 1906, awarded the Legion of Honour, France's highest military accolade. Zola's headline – J'Accuse! – remains one of the most powerful ever published.

Thalidomide

A drug developed in West Germany and used to treat morning sickness in pregnant women, Thalidomide was withdrawn from sale in some European jurisdictions as early as 1961 after being linked with birth defects. Again, the campaign run by The Sunday Times to secure adequate compensation for the thousands of victims wasn't a scoop exactly. But constant pressure from the paper throughout the 1960s and early 1970s led Distillers, who had manufactured the drug for sale in the UK, to up the level of compensation they were offering victims. Questions in the House of Commons and a shareholder revolt at Distillers helped, but it was the power of the press that shamed the firm into action. The compensation offer eventually reached £32 million.

The My Lai Massacre

In March 1968, between 300 and 500 unarmed Vietnamese villagers were murdered by American soldiers from the 23rd Infantry Division. Some of the dead women had been gang-raped and among the victims were many children. The oldest victim was 82, the youngest, just one year old. A cover-up followed but on November 12, 1969, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh finally broke the story for wire service the Associated Press. The story made headlines around the world, was instrumental in galvanising the peace movement in the US and caused a falling away of public support for the war in Vietnam. Now 80, Hersh is still writing for The New Yorker and The London Review Of Books, most recently concerning the use in the Syrian conflict of the poison gas, sarin.

“The Dodgy Dossier”

Originally coined by online magazine Spiked to describe a government briefing document about Iraq issued to journalists in September 2002 – the so-called September Dossier – the term has come to apply to both it and a further document issued in February 2003. Both documents made the case for the war in Iraq but the veracity of many of the facts used, how and from where those facts were sourced, and the subsequent conclusions drawn from them were all questioned by journalists. Particularly contentious was the claim that Saddam Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes. When, on May 29, BBC Defence Correspondent Andrew Gilligan claimed on BBC Radio Four's Today programme that the document had been “sexed up” to better make the case for war and that the intelligence services had concerns about the fact, it was all-out war between the Government and the BBC. No weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.

The Killing Fields

New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his coverage of the takeover of Cambodia by the Communist Khmer Rouge and their genocidal leader Pol Pot in 1975. Although ordered by his editor to leave the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh as it fell to the Khmer Rouge, Schanberg stayed on. He and his colleague Dith Pran took refuge in the French embassy and from there reported on the atrocities committed by the communist guerillas. When Schanberg finally left, he had to leave Pran behind. The Cambodian finally escaped to America in 1979 and joined Schanberg on The New York Times as a photographer, and a 1980 magazine article Schanberg wrote about his friend's experiences formed the basis of the Oscar-winning 1984 film, The Killing Fields.

Stakeknife

In 2003, the Sunday Herald revealed the identify of the spy working at the heart of the IRA for British military intelligence. The revelations about Freddie Scappaticci – codenamed Stakeknife – drew back the veil on the full extent of the "dirty war" in Ulster. The Stakeknife stories uncovered how Britain had effectively "taken over" Northern Ireland paramilitary organisations – including the IRA and the UVF – in order to control them. However, by using their agents inside terror groups the British army and intelligence service became complicit in multiple murders.

Watergate

The grandaddy of investigative journalism exposés, and the one which gave us a suffix that has since adorned everything from Fergiegate (a tabloid sting operation involving the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson) to Nipplegate (the “wardrobe malfunction” Janet Jackson suffered during the 2004 Superbowl half-time show). Watergate, actually the name of an office complex in Washington DC burgled in 1972 because it housed the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, came to signify a widespread campaign of illegal surveillance by Richard Nixon's Republican administration. The 1972 scandal was revealed piecemeal in The Washington Post by journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, famously portrayed by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman in the 1976 film All The President's Men. As a result of the Watergate revelations, Nixon was forced to resign in 1974.

NSA surveillance

In June 2013, The Guardian and The Washington Post together revealed that America's National Security Agency (NSA) had been running a massive global surveillance programme with the co-operation of telecommunications companies and some European governments. The story came from a huge tranche of leaked documents provided to journalists Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald by whistleblower Edward Snowden, previously

employed by the NSA. The four met in secret in Hong Kong, one step ahead of the American authorities. Snowden eventually ended up in Russia, where he was awarded temporary asylum. He's still there. The Guardian, meanwhile, got the scoop of the century so far.

The Serb Detention Camps

In early August 1992, during the Balkans War, ITN's Penny Marshall and Channel 4 News's Ian Williams broadcast news stories showing emaciated and starving Muslim prisoners being held behind barbed wire in detention camps run by Bosnian Serbs. The camps, at Trnopolje and Omarska, were at the centre of allegations of torture and executions. The Guardian's Ed Vulliamy also travelled with the team and provided the first newspaper eyewitness account on August 7. He was later called as a witness at the war crimes trial of Serbian leader Radovan Karad?i?.

Israel's Nuclear Arsenal

The fact that Israel was developing a nuclear programme had been known since the 1960s, but on October 5, 1986, using documents provided by former nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, The Sunday Times exposed the extent of the country's weapons programme. While in hiding in London, Vanunu was lured to Rome by a female agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and kidnapped. By the time The Sunday Times story ran, he was already back in Israel, where he was tried behind closed doors and convicted. He served 18 years in prison.