Last week saw monumental change in media, politics and national life, most notably: Donald Trump, who dominated popular culture the last four years, is out of the White House and finally off every social media platform that matters.
It was also a week of hope, promise and major resets. In his inaugural address, President Joe Biden had said, "There is truth and there are lies ... We must unite to defeat the lies."
Trump, of course, was the liar in chief who used the most powerful platform in the nation to poison our information ecosystem with propaganda, disinformation, misinformation and conspiracy theories. We saw how convincing his biggest lie - that he won the election - was to some of his followers who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 on his behalf leaving five dead.
The battle over accurate information, the lifeblood of democracy, is anything but over. The damage that Trump has done to facts, science, information and honest journalism is going to take years if not generations to restore.
A coherent strategy involving journalists, teachers, political leaders and citizens is needed. It could be a tough task given that I am no longer sure most citizens even care whether they live in a media environment built on facts or a world of ideology and magical thinking built on alternative facts.
Consider this fact: According to a Pew study published Jan. 15, 34% of voters incorrectly say Trump definitely or probably was the rightful election winner. Think of that, one-third still believe Trump won, which, just for the record, he did not.
Consider this observation as well: Fox News, the biggest alligator in the swamp of right-wing media, is taking a hard turn back to the right after briefly flirting with something resembling journalism during the last days of the presidential race. Fox News got good reviews in the mainstream media for being the first to call Arizona as a win for Biden on election night, but there was hell to pay from the hard right, which viewed it as nothing less than a betrayal of Trump.
The internal fallout from that election night call continued last week with Fox firing Chris Stirewalt, the digital politics editor and the one person at Fox News who could be trusted on election night. Remember how he stood his ground in 2012 when Fox analyst Karl Rove challenged him and his colleagues on their call of Ohio for Barack Obama? Stirewalt defended the Arizona call as well in November, and he was right. But last Tuesday, he was out of a job.
Add to that two smaller right-wing channels in Newsmax and One America News Network battling to see who can be harder on Biden and more in league with the followers of Trump, expect truth to be one of the first casualties.
And don't expect Trump to sit down there in Florida and keep his mouth shut either.
In his farewell Wednesday before boarding Air Force One for Florida, Trump told a small group of family and friends, "We will be back in some form." I don't doubt him. He cannot live without seeing himself on television. There is no reason in the world to think he is suddenly going to start telling the truth or anything close to it when he returns.
Reestablishing a culture of fact and truth is going to be a long and hard haul. It starts with media outlets and workers taking a tough look at their performances in covering Trump, acknowledging their errors and vowing to be better the next time they are tempted with ratings or page views to provide favorable coverage of someone who would destroy our very democracy. That kind of self examination and harsh critique is something most in the media don't do well.
But it has to go beyond the media. We need our schools to teach media literacy, starting in middle school.
We also need citizens who want more from their media than to be titillated, amused and spoken to at the most superficial, least intellectually challenging level.
Everybody says they want truth, but few stood up as Trump and his allies buried it under a trash heap of lies. Let's start by accepting that truth and go from there.
The Baltimore Sun