Social media--it's a big deal. But as someone who was a teenager in rural Kansas when @FoxNews & conservative radio hit in the '90s & watched local culture rapidly change before my eyes, know that they laid the groundwork for this could-be civil war way before Trump & his tweets.

Good time to revisit this @newyorker masterpiece by @JaneMayerNYer. Businesses withdrawing from complicit online platforms, very good. But who is holding this juggernaut accountable for its ABSOLUTELY PERVASIVE propaganda, on millions of TVs as we speak? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house

Rush Limbaugh is not the name du jour, but who is holding him accountable? Friends if you'd spent long, pre-Spotify hours on rural highways getting to a job or a store or to school, you would know that car radios--yep, radios--played a very large role in this moment.

Much can be traced to when Reagan's FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. We briefly discussed this in First Amendment class in journalism school; this media honesty-check was repealed in the name of freedom. Now our free press (and ads, my god) has been hijacked by liars.

Any solution to our current crisis must address MEDIA--empower true journalists, dismantle propagandists high and low.

@JoeBiden could create a Secretary of Media Literacy to restore understanding and respect of the free press, educate masses re: 21st C information discernment.

It makes me queasy to suggest it, so important is the line between government and the Fourth Estate, but we've so eroded our relationship to venerable journalism that, ironically, federal policy might need to help restore it. Could be done well with vigilance by the right people.