A recent piece in The Philadelphia Inquirer connects the plunge in newspaper readership to people’s completely false and wrong understanding and beliefs about the economy, public policy, the environment, public health and most other things that we all should know involving our government. To combat charisma without character, truth needs to be told carefully and skillfully. And government officials have for too long failed, relying too much on traditional news coverage to translate the truth for them. It hasn’t been very effective and it’s an increasingly losing proposition.

Getting facts and truth out and getting them to stick requires creativity, an understanding of where and how people consume information, and it desperately needs repetition – lots and lots of repetition.