President Elect Joe Biden is not one to be envied with the tremendous task at hand not only taking on the reign from a disastrous administration that’s been a disaster for America and the world on so many levels, but also in dealing smartly with the potential political landmines laid out by this administration to make his job a nightmare – I suspect this will be the pattern for sometime into the new administration though not as publicly. Two priorities that stand out for me among others – one obvious and one not so obvious. The obvious one is coming up with a plan backed with a task force as he already suggested to effectively deal with the pandemic in the U.S and coordinating with other countries in this effort. The other main issues that needs to be tacked rather urgently is the control of disinformation not just in social media but also/particularly in the news media in general. There needs to be clear guidelines for eliminating disinformation and consequences for not abiding by them. It will most probably take time to come up with legislation to cover this area but until then I feel there needs to be a provisional set of guidelines that need to be followed by news media organizations – particularly after coming out of an administration that was actively propagating disinformation since day 1 and considering the urgency of the tasks at hand including dealing with the pandemic itself. If America is to learn anything at all coming out of 4 year coma with trump & inc it should be that truly Media Matters because it has the power to literally make or break democracies and any form of freedom including that of expression must be tempered with common sense rules otherwise a Democracy becomes a self-destruct proposition.
Hope this helps.