a 12-step program for a healthier country

1. We, the creators and consumers of journalism in the United States, admit that we are powerless over our desire to write and read and produce/watch/listen to reports about the current president of the United States and that our reporting and consumption of journalism has become unmanageable because we are powerless to stop repeating his lies, even if we may be aggressively questioning them or even cursing them.
2. We have come to believe that only a pledge to not treat him as a central communicator of truth in our time can restore sanity to our journalism and our daily lives.
3. We have made a decision to turn our journalistic and reading and listening and viewing decisions over to the truth.
4. We have made a searching and fearless moral inventory of our journalistic work and our reading and media consumption habits.
5. We have admitted to ourselves and to other human beings the exact nature of our failings in journalism and in the media we follow. 
6. We are entirely ready to join in a communal effort to remove all these defects.
7. We humbly ask all who think similarly to join in solving these shortcomings.
8. We have made an inventory of all the ways our addiction harms ourselves and others and we are willing to make amends.
9. We will make public amends and will additionally make direct amends wherever possible, except when to do so would injure others.
10. We are continuing to take personal inventory and when our journalism, our reading, our media streaming go in the wrong direction, we will promptly admit it.
11. We have sought to improve our conscious and truthful connection with the journalism we produce and consume and with fellow readers/consumers of news in the hopes that we all may carry these directives out.
12. Having had this awakening, we are trying to carry this message to others so addicted so that we all may practice these principles in our journalistic enterprises and our daily media and social media practices.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain. He’s a troll, an attention-grabber, who uses insult and fabrication to corral the nation’s eyes and ears. He knows nothing and can offer nothing, not even solace or sentiment.

The press is the president’s personal ventilator. When it repeats his lies, it gives them a patina of truth. When it reports on his insults, it amplifies them with explanations, analysis and denunciations, creating a steaming heap of non-stop cable and internet bloviating. There’s no way around it: media creators and consumers legitimize his bombast and make it seem like decisive action.

It’s time to do what the president is doing to the sick and dying across the nation when he refuses to fully implement the Defense Production Act or to divvy up the nation’s stockpile of medical equipment to needy states – and deprive him of the oxygen he needs to dominate each day’s news cycle.

This is not to say that we will stop covering or consuming the news emerging from the White House. Rather, the conceptual order of this news will no longer be ‘who, what, when, where, why and how.’ It will be ‘what, why, how, when, where’ and, further down, below the fold, on an inside page, and certainly not highlighted as a chyron, ‘who.’

This means we will commit to understanding the world’s crises as complicated things and we will cover the people who are responding to them with nuance and expertise. Our most important job as reporters and citizens is to refuse to get caught up in the echo chamber and instead to seek out the truth.

It’s time for everyone – the media and consumers of media, people who love the guy as well as people who hate him – to conquer our communal addiction to the man currently serving as the president of the United States. We must wean ourselves from our sick cravings and obsessions. We must break our nightmarish national infatuation. We must starve the troll to feed the future.