In just two days,video asia boy seduced sex skirts Donald Trump took us all from @EmergencyKittens to North Korea's nuclear program.
Such is the news in 2017: The personal Twitter account that helped Trump control the election's narrative now drives the entire American news cycle. Meanwhile, Trump hasn't held a press conference since June (there's one now scheduled for January 11), effectively gutting any power journalists once had to push the president-elect on his statements.
This is the new reality newsrooms are learning to operate under. It's challenging basic assumptions, like: "We should call out the president-elect when he tweets something factually inaccurate."
"It's almost feeding into the message," said Laura McGann, editorial director at Vox.
"His message is 'the media is out to get me.' So by fact checking, are you amplifying that message? I don't know. I get stuck on that question, and I have leaned away from assigning pure fact checks of tweets and trying to offer more analysis than that."
McGann's far from alone. The debate over how the media should cover Trump—and in particular, his Twitter feed—is playing out in newsrooms across the country, as well as publicly, between journalists.
On one side, journalists (like McGann) see the game and feel the need for it to change. It's a kind of meta-journalism that requires reporters to take a leap of faith, and believe that the greater good is served by notcorrecting the president-elect.
There are compelling points on the other side of this, though. Journalism shouldn't change just because Trump's become a one-man flood of inaccuracies and distractions. Reporters will need to continue to go after each and every claim, or risk giving up far too much ground (and "normalizing").
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It's a problem flummoxing even some of the most veteran journalists. On Sunday's Meet The Press, NYT executive editor Dean Baquet laid out the tension newsrooms are facing now, in how to cover Trump's Twitter feed.
"In the end, he's the President of the United States. And in the end, everything he says, small and large, bears scrutiny and reporting. Will there get to be a point, you know, a year from now, where he is tweeting about, you know, what he saw at the theater last night and that's less interesting? Maybe. On the other hand, you've got to admit that if the president of the United States tweets something about something he watched or something that upsets him, you've got to scrutinize it. These aren't press releases. These are the personal utterances of the president. I think we have to treat them with balance, right? If he tweets about a world issue or about Russia, big story. If he tweets about Vanity Fair, small story, but a small story that offers a little bit insight into his temperament too."
Implicit in Baquet's message is that there's little (if any) expectation that there won't be much changing in Trump's use of Twitter as his primary mode of communication with the world. Trump has already shown little regard for the traditions and norms between a president and the press, whether it be a lack of protective pools, or a lack of press conferences.
He does, however, come from a long line of presidents who sought to drive the media narrative. Kerry Lauerman, executive news director at Mic, likened Trump's ability to use Twitter to the fireside chats of Franklin Roosevelt, and even the weekly addresses of Barack Obama.
"There's nothing new about that. Presidents have tried to use stagecraft to have us focus on what they want us to focus on forever," Lauerman said. "So in a way, it's a different form of stagecraft and at the same time something we have to take seriously and cover very closely particularly at a time when he's not giving much media availability."
Right now, the media is still learning how to toe the line between, as Lauerman put it, taking Trump's tweets seriously, and covering them closely (while not falling for the stagecraft). One particularly challenging notion has been reporting on the things Trump has tweeted or said without repeating any falsehoods therein.
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There's also a habit to break. For example: When Trump first began using Twitter his own personal soap box, it was just bizarre. As Trump became a serious candidate and then the Republican nominee for president, his Twitter antics became a spectacle, the likes of which haven't really ever been seen in professional politics. Many in the media could wake up, and rely on Trump to have tweeted something ridiculous, which could then be turned into a story.
Now that he's won an election, Trump's Twitter is something far more serious, and substantial. And it should be seen as such, too.
"I think the key is not to give it some kind of increased novelty because it's a tweet as opposed to a comment," Lauerman said. "I think that's the trap."
For McGann, that means not jumping on every single tweet, especially ones that just aren't anything new.
"If Paul Ryan tweeted 'let's repeal Obamacare,' if Nancy Pelosi tweeted, 'I like Obamacare," I wouldn't write about either of those things," McGann said. "Those are just their stated platforms. I think that's sort of a norm the media has agreed on that we don't consider it news or worthwhile to write up a politician's tweets that are just a stated platform."
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