Heather Cox Richardson

There's increasing crap on social media.

But how do we make sure people have access to

to what's really happening.

And you can see that that war is being played out right now with the new attempt to control CNN, with a purchase that has not gone through, but with the attacks on CBS, with the Fox News channel, with social media, which is being flooded again with bots and trolls.

You know, you watch this and we really do seem to be at war for democracy, but this war is one that is being waged

intellectually, if you will.

And that one is proving less bloody than when people shot at each other with artillery.

But it is no less a war for control of the world, I think.

I can.

Just to be clear, I am not a journalist.

And that matters, I think, because I'm trying to hold the United States to account to history, which is, you know, in many ways, U.S.

Grant is as real to me as Joe Biden, you know, because I interact with both of them in very similar ways.

And they don't really come to me for their news.

They come for somebody who reads a lot and is trained to say this matters, this doesn't, and why this matters and doesn't.

I could never do what I do without people like you.

I mean, we're doing this together.

And I think that's an important caveat.

I think, though, that what we have seen in the period really since the 1980s for a number of reasons is a number of previously independent news media sources becoming essentially pieces of corporations.

And that's different than being a news organization.

What you have started to see, though, and I was sort of in the early wave, but I was not one of the people beginning it, was the same thing we saw in the 1850s or the 1890s, for example, new technologies that permitted people like me to start