Earlier this month, I posted my opinion on how the Media is the issue and a catalyst to the current political climate in which we are now. It is the media that has provided our politicians with a platform to spread their propaganda; either by competing against each other and providing more unnecessary coverage, or by competing against social platforms, and in turn providing unnecessary additional coverage. I realize this has become common nowadays, but Twitter was never created as a way to spread serious ideas. Serious ideas, or thoughts, require more than 140 characters (or more recently 280). Serious ideas require some way to focus the readers and critics to the original idea. Twitter helps to create the opposite of those two requirements.
Twitter helps you to shout. Twitter helps you to create chaos by allowing readers to shift focus from the original idea and morphing it into something completely different. Twitter was founded in 2006 and it was only until 3 years later that it really began to take off. Twitter used to make news because of how fragile it was. The site used to go down all of the time because of the way it was architected. It simply could not handle the peaks of use, and rather than default to a read-only state, it would simply crash.
But in the path to not be out-done and to show how progressive news organizations were, they began to post tweets in their news coverage of reports. Some made sense, like when twitter and facebook were used by people in the midst of the Arab springs. On the other hand, most were dumb. Most posts were from the Kardashians or of people without any credibility. People like you or I who were just ranting, yet they were taken seriously.
This brings us to the 2016 Presidential campaigns and the sausage that was Trump’s twitter feed. Just like a sausage, it was a mix of some meat and garbage, though in his case mostly garbage. The media loved it. They presented these low-quality hotdogs as gourmet meals. “And this just in, candidate Trump just twitted we should kill all Muslims. In other news, tomorrow will be cold…”. The two news items were completely opposite to each other. One was egregious and the other about the weather. Yet, news outlets simply reported them as equals.
It is now 2019 and the barrage of twitter rages has gotten so bad and common, that they’ve become a joke. Something to laugh about. All the while forgetting we’re laughing at the leader of our country. And if we’re laughing, so is the rest of the world. At this point, you would be forgiven to think, well, I don’t follow twitter, or my newscaster of choice does not talk about twitter. If this is the case, good for you. Yet I am certain that while your newscaster of choice may not speak directly about Trump’s twitter rages, he or she do speak about them indirectly. They do that in a more subtle, yet equally disruptive manner. Most often than not, they’ll ask questions like “recently the President twitted about a civil war, do you think he was serious?” or “The President recently talked about he’s a stable genius, what makes someone a genius?”. Trump is basically throwing garbage to a wall and seeing what sticks. He knows the media has no option but to talk about everything he posts. The more outrageous the better. By doing this, Trump is able to control the tone and script of the day’s news reports.
Trump’s genius is not of the type we bestow upon someone of higher intellect. His genius is that of someone that has mastered the Pavlovian reaction of news outlets that support themselves based upon views and clicks. Like Pavlov’s dogs, news outlets cannot help themselves.
