Here’s a Very Serious Journalism Dilemma in the age of Donald Trump, according to the New York Times: If Trump tweets it, is it news? You might just want to bang your head down on the desk now, before you even read any further.
How to cover a president’s pronouncements when they are both provocative and maddeningly vague? Does an early-morning tweet amount to a planned shift in American policy? Should news outlets, as some readers argue, ignore clearly untrue tweets, rather than amplify falsehoods further?
And those are the only two options, right? Ignore or amplify—rebutting is not on the table.
In interviews on Tuesday, political editors and reporters said that, for now, they planned to apply the same news judgment they would apply to any statement by a powerful leader, even as some acknowledged that social media allows Mr. Trump to reduce complicated subjects to snappy, and sometimes misleading, slogans and sound bites.
As opposed to his interviews, speeches, and press conferences (if he ever gave any press conferences), where Trump embraces complexity and never misleads. Give me a break here.
This really shouldn’t be this hard. Twitter is one of the main venues the president-elect uses to tell Americans and the world what he’s thinking. What he’s thinking has policy implications, and it’s news. What he’s thinking also often reveals how unstable he is and how little he knows or cares about the rule of law, which is in itself newsworthy.
At the same time, every single Trump tweet does not need to receive hours of breathless cable news coverage to the exclusion of stories about his massive conflicts of interest or the extremists he’s appointing to his administration. Covering a Trump tweet is rarely something that should take up a lot of time or resources. You don’t need a team of researchers with deep expertise in constitutional law to conclude that stripping someone’s citizenship for burning a flag is unconstitutional, for instance. You can say “the president-elect suggested something flatly unconstitutional on Twitter this morning. Now here’s our report on how his pick for education secretary has no education qualifications beyond having spent millions of dollars trying to harm public education. It will be followed by our report on how he’s shaking down other countries for personal profit.”
But the idea that we should ignore what Trump is saying because he’s saying it 140 characters at a time? That’s a big nope.