Monitoring
Aaron Blake at the Washington Post also says no we shouldn’t ignore Trump’s tweets.
Undergirding the idea that Trump’s tweets shouldn’t be big news is the theory that he’s manipulating the media into focusing on small things to cover up less sexy but more important things — conflicts of interests and possible corruption, in particular.
I’m skeptical any such plan exists, given that Trump’s thin-skinned tweeting is pretty indiscriminate. But this idea has returned with a vengeance given the latest tweetstorm, and it’s likely to perk up again after Trump on Tuesday morning suggested revoking the citizenship or jailing of people who burn the American flag.
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What we’re basically talking about here is treating Trump like a social media troll with an egg for an avatar who can be blocked or ignored and hopefully loses the will to keep harassing us.
But this is the president-elect of the United States. The job comes with the so-called bully pulpit, and what he says matters and will be the subject of debate no matter what the mainstream media does. Everything he says reverberates. It doesn’t matter if he says it on Twitter or at a news conference; either way it’s going to be consumed by tens of millions of people, and the media has an important role to play when it comes to fact-checking and providing context.
Plus it matters. It matters that he’s that reckless and irresponsible, that petty and vain, that rage-driven and out of control, that wholly unfit for the job he’s taken on.
ProPublica senior reporting fellow Jessica Huseman nailed it in an interview with The Fix’s Callum Borchers on Monday.
“If he had said something similar in a press conference, no one would be concerned that journalists are getting distracted by his absurd language,” Huseman said. “But because it was a tweet, that’s somehow different? Unfortunately, this president-elect has decided to make Twitter his main means of communicating with the American public, and the American public listens deeply to things that he says on Twitter.”
We can’t ignore any of it.
I totally agree. Let’s not ignore the fact that the president-elect believes (or is willing to pretend he believes) that revoking someone’s citizenship for burning a flag is a good idea.
Of course, this is just the same old ‘the Internet isn’t real life’ bullshit we’ve been having to contend with since arseholes took over Tweetbookgramblrsnap.
People are saying the tweets are a distraction from his cabinet picks; others (like Seth Meyers) are saying the cabinet picks themselves are a distraction from the conflicts of interest; eventually the Alex Jones set will say that the supposed conflicts of interest are a distraction from the Lizardati taking over at long last.
None of it’s a distraction. It’s all out there, for everyone to see. They finally discovered that if you don’t give a shit, there’s nothing that can really stop you.