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Dear Editor;
By the time this issue of the _Chronicle _is available, Donald Trump will no longer be President of the United States. I hope this will be sufficient reason to stop printing letters that reference his erroneous claims about virtually everything. Perpetuating these falsehoods long after they are proven false - the recent claim of a fraudulent election being a perfect example - has profoundly undermined our democracy and given his divisive political agenda the oxygen to stay alive and continue harming the country.
Both the print and broadcast media need to carefully consider their role in what has occurred over the last four years that brought us to the point that we now have four times more federal troops guarding our nation's capital than are deployed in Afghanistan, and state capitals across the country are protected by chain link and barbed-wire fences. This is not the portrait of free nation.
Journalists needs to ask themselves how much of what appeared in print and on the airways served the common good of the country and how much was promoting sensationalist political theatre that attracted an audience, and enabled the unrest that culminated in the armed insurrection that occurred two weeks ago? How many journalistic decisions were made because the material increased revenue and how many were based upon the public good? In other words, who benefited by public media perpetuating the lies the Trump administration spewed? Certainly, it wasn't our country or its citizens.
Equally, we, as citizens of a participatory democracy, bear some responsibility for what has occurred. Free speech rights include the responsibility to be critical consumers of information, not purveyors of falsehoods. We must hold the public media accountable for what it says, writes, and promotes. When media continually reports on a political agenda based on "alternative facts" rather than proven truths and scientific data, we need to call it what it is, and we failed to do that soon enough.
January 20th marks both the day Trump becomes old news and the beginning of a new chapter in an America that is divided against itself. The first "shot in a new civil war" as fired on January 6 when insurrectionists overtook the nation's capital. The media, both local and national, must not continue allowing itself to be used as a weapon in this conflict, because if it does, America will ultimately fail this most recent test of whether we, as a republic, can mend our differences enough to secure our footing on common ground - and endure.

Paula vW. Dail
Emerita Research Professor of
Social Welfare and Public Policy
Spring Green