How do we even know what to believe anymore?
As a media literacy educator, that’s the question I hear most often.
You may remember me as the columnist who wrote about parenting, couplehood, and hot takes on cultural phenomena like cuddle parties. But five years ago, while watching a misinformed mob storm the US Capitol, I realized that as a people, our collective sniff test for dishonesty … is plumb busted.
Since then, I’ve studied how information is created, spread, consumed, and controlled. I’ve spoken to hundreds of students about what fuels influencers, helped thousands of community members sort fact from fiction, produced an online course on recognizing misinformation, and even met with lawmakers to plead for media-literacy legislation.
What all of them want to know: In a post-truth world, how do we figure out who to trust?
As kids, we’re promised: The truth is all that matters. “Just tell the truth, sweetheart, and no one will get in trouble.” The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth shall set you free … right?
But in a nation where vaccine rates are dropping even as eradicated diseases resurface and claim lives, and GenAI lets anyone whip up compelling deepfake videos, it’s tough to pluck the truth from the torrent of propaganda — the absolute Niagara of ideological evangelism — flooding us every day, from every channel.
Our president’s mouth consistently erupts in rubbish — an MO sustained by a press trained to uphold their own balance and objectivity über alles. We all heard the Commander in Chief say that Haitian immigrants were eating pets (false), and that Tylenol is linked to autism; it’s not. This month, he told us we hadn’t seen — with our own eyes, from multiple angles — an ICE agent kill a Minneapolis woman for no reason.
And it’s getting worse. Rather than pinpoint a “Lie of the Year” as it’s done for the 15 years prior, fact-checking org PolitiFact simply named 2025 The Year of the Lies because “the volume and severity of the inaccurate claims was just overwhelming.”
Deception goes by many names: Gaslighting. Fibs. Fake news. Alternative facts. Spin. Doublespeak. Disinformation. But a lie by any other name still smells like bullshit. And we’re going to shovel through it together, friends.
In this new column, we’ll learn how to think critically about the information we’re fed, and to find and vet trustworthy sources. We’ll poke holes in our own cozy media bubbles and discover how fact-checkers put statements to the test. And we’ll finally figure out how to engage and tolerate family members whose news sources have made them, respectfully, whacka-frickin-doodle.
Look, I have strong feelings on this topic (…okay, on most topics). But I’m also curious, fascinated, and still slightly more hopeful than terrified. I’ll get things wrong sometimes — I’m not immune to lies well told. But I promise my blunders will be misinformation (the ignorant, accidental kind), not disinformation (the deliberate, diabolical kind). And I trust you’ll let me know when I flub; you’ve never been shy before! In a no-cap world, friends don’t let friends spew codswallop. If we’re connected on social media, you know I’ll call out your balderdash, too. (#Sorrynotsorry, Mom!)
I don’t want to live in a world where half my neighbors operate from and invest in an entirely different “truth” than I do — or one where the word truth lives between quotation marks. And I know you don’t, either. Because nobody wants to be misled, and not a single human being thinks lying is how we improve as a species.
But sometimes it’s profitable. And expedient. Increasingly, it’s also the most direct route to a sloppy, slippery power grab.
So, we all need to be informed. Shielded. Armed, even. Because as George Orwell said in his eerily prescient 1984, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
