Press Play
131 days in, the covfefe tweet shows that Trump isn’t beating the media; the media wants to be played.
Since November 8, America’s readers have been bombarded with pieces about how the media needs to wise up and learn how to cover Trump. It’s understandable. Trump’s level of animosity toward the media is unprecedented for a US president, while his electoral victory proved the ineffectiveness of traditional journalistic approaches in the face of swaggering post-truth politics.
But whatever the new strategy may be, it would need to balance two imperatives: 1) don’t allow the regime and its abuses of power, bucking of liberal democratic norms, and open hostility against non-straight-white-male demographics to become normalized, and 2) don’t feed Trump’s bottomless gluttony for attention and thereby encourage his outlandishness and penchant for running his mouth.
These two goals seem to work at cross-purposes, though. It’s not surprising then that the non-right-wing media hasn’t figured it out yet. There’s no shame in that, necessarily. But simple goals certainly seem achievable — like not treating every Trumpian utterance and tweet as a six-alarm blaze, thereby numbing a reader’s sense of scale when it comes to outrage over malfeasance.
The Covfefe Incident has demonstrated what is shameful, though: the media hasn’t just not figured out how to cover Trump in the strange, dark territory of his presidency; the media, in spite of its own insistence, has little desire to figure it out.
Covfefe was a softball. If the goal during Trump’s regime is to cover what’s impactful and ignore or downplay his meaningless tantrums and attention-seeking, then the covfefe tweet was a platinum opportunity for news outlets to show restraint. Instead, what America saw was enthusiastic gotchas and obvious, be-the-first-to-post-it Twitter jokes from journalists and media personalities. Sites covered the tweet and the reactions to it as serious news. Basically, it was the same shit people did during the primary and general elections.
Remember 13 months ago? On May 4, 2016, Trump became the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, a political body that has since, despite some diehards, more or less openly embraced white nationalism as a guiding ethos to go along with a tradition of shameless corporatism. That was a big deal.
In the leadup to his primary victory — a foregone conclusion well before it was “presumptive” — some in the media wondered if, in their blind rush for ratings and clicks, they had given Trump too much pagespace and airtime, if, in fact, overcoverage had given Trump outsized influence, as his antics and semi-literate mouth noises didn’t really fuss GOP enthusiasts after all and actually endeared him to rubes and truck-nut patriots. It was a rare moment of humility and soul-interrogation in American culture. Surely people would figure it out for the general election.
And then on May 5, Trump tweeted a picture of himself with a taco bowl. You know the rest.
Saying “the media” is a somewhat unfair generalization. There is no monolithic media that actually exists. There are writers engaged in earnest truth-telling and journalists all over doing meaningful work. The issue is more a business and editorial one. And while the word media encompasses more than the journalistic and bloggy world of news, politics, and commentary, “media” is a term of convenience, especially when certain trends hold true across the major papers, stations, and sites. And I challenge you to find one that didn’t present breathless coverage of the covfefe tweet on Wednesday.
Even though covering the tweet accomplished little.
Was it interesting? No. He obviously meant to type “coverage” and somewhere along the line he fucked up.
Did we learn anything new? No. We already know he tweets. We know he tweets nonsense. We know he tweets late at night. We know his communications team has little say over what he types. We didn’t gain any new insight into his policies, his plans, his executive branch dynamics, his relationships, his ideology, his business interests, his personal feelings, his racism, his misogyny, his crimes, his vanity, his fetishes, his psyche, his childhood fears, or the overgrown brier patch that is his cognitive framework. Nothing.
But was it consequential? No. Sometimes Trump’s tweets move markets. Sometimes they alienate our allies. Sometimes they make us fear for the survival of humanity. Covfefe didn’t tell us anything like that.
Maybe it was a moment that could effectively embarrass or shame Trump? Come on. When it comes to shame with Trump, we’re working with a theoretical construct. No one’s yet discovered evidence of Trump’s capacity for the emotion.
Covering the tweet as a major news event — hell, covering it at all — only actually accomplished one thing: a craven chase for clicks.
And maybe a collective sense among the sane and reasonable that they are in fact still on the right side of history. But they knew that already too. They say it often enough.
Since November 8, you’ve likely been treated to ads from papers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, whose strategy has been to guilt-trip you into buying subscriptions, as a robust fourth estate is a cornerstone of a functioning liberal democracy. And that is true. The US is freer for having a strong media sector. That said, there’s more than a touch of disingenuousness in the ad campaigns, because (aside from helping to enable Trump in the first place) the Trump regime has been good for business, at least in the short term. Editors see dollar signs every time they commission another insipid thinkpiece full of embedded tweets on the next minor faux pas.
After the election, mainstream outlets made a show of wringing their hands as they claimed to think about how they could restrategize and be smarter, how they could better serve the needs of democracy. After all, Democracy Dies in Darkness. If those outlets want people to take them more seriously on that front, they could start by actually, finally rethinking how to cover Trump.
In fairness, the media has been relentless about, for instance, Russia, the ACA repeal, and the Muslim ban. But there are plenty more GOP policies, Trumpian abominations, and, yes, Democratic Party hypocrisies that could be promoted as fervently as the covfefe story.
Leave Twitter gaffes to the amateur comedians populating social media. They don’t have anything better to do.
