Dear Mainstream News: Stop Covering the US President’s Twitter Feed
If you were to have opened up CNN in the early afternoon of Sunday September 17th, you would have noticed the entire top half of your computer or phone screen filled up by Donald Trump’s face, with this substanceless headline sitting on top:
In fact, if you’d visited CNN’s website at 1:30pm (where the header reads CNN — Breaking News), you’d have found that the entire front page of the network’s website was covered by stories or videos featuring the President of the United States’ tweet, and it wasn’t just CNN. To MSNBC’s credit, the tweet could not be found on their site, but others didn’t show the same restraint. Amy B Wang of the Washington Post wrote an article about it almost immediately. On the Guardian’s US news page, the first article to show up displayed the headline Trump tweets anti-Clinton meme as tensions flare over her memoir, taking precedence over stories about the police investigation into the Baton Rouge killings and anticipated protests in St. Louis over the acquittal of a white officer in a police killing, both examples of stories that are far more newsworthy than a meme.
Now, of course, not all tweets should be treated equal. The same morning as Donald Trump retweeted the .GIF depicting Hillary Clinton being hit by the President from the fairway, he also wrote a tweet earlier in the day that actually contained (at least a reference to) policy substance. What’s infuriating about the coverage of Trump’s twitter feed on Sunday is that the only story in the first page of Google search results from “donald trump tweets” yielding any discussion of policy, or anything of remote journalistic worth, was provided by NPR, and it was about a completely different tweet.
In a single morning, Trump had tweeted three different things that could have actually been covered with some journalistic substance, a discussion of policy, and fact-checking. Besides the tweet about North Korea’s economy taking yet another hit after newly-imposed sanctions, which was thankfully picked up by NPR (we can always rely on NPR, can’t we), there was a more subtle but much more important tweet — one that could have easily been covered by any self-respecting journalist at an outlet that had the resources — but it received coverage only from local news media in Michigan. That was one tweet about Bill Schuette (or in the President’s original tweet, written as Bill “Shuette”).
At 4:40AM, Trump wrote a reworded tweet in support of Bill Schuette, the Attorney General of Michigan, in his bid to become the state’s next Governor (after deleting an older tweet which had spelled his name wrong). With regards to policy substance, any news outlet could have covered Schuette’s work as Attorney General and discussed the rationale behind the President’s support for his candidacy, by maybe raising such concerns as his supposed attacks on journalists in his state, the wasting of $1.9 million in taxpayer money for legal fees after losing in the landmark 2015 Supreme Court decision to legalise same-sex marriage, or his attempts to kill a bill that would make it easier for well-behaved inmates to get back into society and begin rebuilding their lives. What could have been a headline educating readers about a candidate’s poor record on policy was instead brushed aside and replaced by outraged news stories over some .GIF image that, actually, was kind of funny. The readers of CNN, the Guardian, and the Washington Post could have walked away from their computer and phone screens knowing something new about the dysfunctionality of part of their country’s judicial leadership, but instead, most self-respecting readers probably skipped past the article on Trump’s tweet entirely, or even just uninstalled the app.
It’s quite honestly a disappointment.
If a 17-year-old student at music school could drag up all of those details over lunch and write about it on Medium.com before midday, then it’s fairly disconcerting that the only thing six-figure-paid “journalists” could come up with, while working for “the most trusted name in news” in the case of CNN, was some substanceless coverage of Donald Trump retweeting a meme from one of his diehard supporters. CNN and the rest of the mainstream news media get a bad rep from the current President, but the only reason anybody listens to the Commander in Chief when he talks about these outlets being “fake news” is because they’ve created a platform for themselves to be mocked. Corporate-funded news stations have found themselves seriously lacking in journalistic credibility for years now. Though the term “fake news” has only really become widely used in recent months, with The Hill reporting on a Harvard-Harris poll in May that said 65% of all voters (80% Republican, 60% Democrat and 53% Independent) believed “there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media,” trust in the media has been significantly low and steadily declining since 2005, according to Gallup.
It’s the little things in journalism that seem to count the most. Currently, there is hardly a single person aged 16–35 in North America that takes CNN and outlets like it seriously, and that is because of stories like this. Their reporting includes no hint of nuance, rarely any discussion of policy matters and issues, and a degree of tone deafness that is only rivaled by people like the leadership of the Democratic Party. Mainstream news outlets are in bad need of reform if they don’t want to be taken over by the wave of independent media outlets that are steadily catching up to them in viewership.
If these news outlets want to start becoming serious in the eyes of the everyday American (and Canadian, for that matter), then their journalists and writers need to start taking more care in their reporting and stop losing sight of why they were employed in the first place. That is, of course, if they were employed for any reason but their unwillingness to “rock the boat” in the first place. Only time will tell.
