3 Big Media Reforms to Consider

The United States may never recover from the warped use of propaganda by the Trump Administration. In many ways, Donald Trump is the modern equivalent of Nazi communications savant Joseph Goebbels, who used propaganda to trick Germans.

Eighty years later, Trump deployed a modern combination of reality TV and social media influencer tactics with reflexive control misinformation strategies to polarize the nation and seize power. His communications savvy consolidated power and literally built an alternative reality accepted by tens of millions of Americans.

Fortunately, Trump is pretty incompetent in every other way, causing him to lose the 2020 election and fail in his coup attempts.

What if opinion-based cable news network shows had to use a warning label to clearly delineate their content as one person’s view and not news?

Still, communications have become weaponized, from polarized mastheads in their many forms through government public affairs, sewing distrust on all sides. The resulting environment damaged institutions and international standing, injected hate into the country's moral fabric, and cost at least 100,000 additional American lives at the hands of the coronavirus.

Now we must clean up this mess.

Identifying Three Primary Problem Areas for Reform