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Dear Journalists: Stop Taking Trump Literally

posted by Snow on Thursday December 01 2016, @06:34AM   
from the head-in-the-sand dept.

n1 has submitted the following story:

Just before the dawn of the Trump administration, journalism in Washington, DC, faces an existential crisis -- but virtually no one in the profession is willing to diagnose it.

Here it is: For the first time, words don't matter. In August, as a guest on MSNBC's Meet the Press Daily, I noted that voters take Donald Trump seriously but not literally, while journalists take him literally, but not seriously.

[...] And journalists keep falling for it because they, like politicians, over-value words -- and they are now covering a politician who does not. President-elect Trump still takes the same cavalier approach to verbal description as he would in hawking a condo tower that's yet to be designed. And more than enough voters don't seem to mind. Trump has spent a career interacting with journalists, but as the first president never to serve in the military, the cabinet, or another public office before his election to the White House, he's never been immersed in the word culture that drives political journalism. [...] Most recently, when Trump announced he had chosen South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to be his ambassador to the United Nations, journalists raced to re-tweet a March rant from Trump in which he said the people of South Carolina should be embarrassed by her.

[...] Writing endless columns on this or that flip-flop based on Trump's conflicting rhetoric is wasting the time of the readers and viewers who have decided that's not what matters with this particular President-elect. [...] If the press covers Trump the way it covered prior presidents -- too literally -- it may find its own customers take journalism itself a lot less seriously.

Source: CNN

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Original Submission

• Re:Like this is the first politician to talk crap. Re:Like this is the first politician to talk crap. (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @01:44PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @01:44PM (#435417)

  Hope not.

  While the elites are most definitely on the chopping block, so will their handmaidens. And that will include a huge swath of liberals for little more than being useful idiots, which will have the flavor of the Reign of Terror. It won't be worth the effort to separate the evil from the merely gullible, and that is going to be ugly and taint the soul of all involved.

  I mean I really hope people will come to their senses and see what's on the line, but given recent responses, that seems pretty far removed.

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• Re:Like this is the first politician to talk crap. (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @05:37AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 02 2016, @05:37AM (#435824)

  While the elites are most definitely on the chopping block, so will their handmaidens. And that will include a huge swath of liberals for little more than being useful idiots, which will have the flavor of the Reign of Terror.

  Yeah, Reign of Terror. Yeah, elites on the chopping block. Yeah, lots of handmaidens on the chopping block too. What all of you don't seem to have yet grasped is that revolutions are not at all tidy. They tend to be very messy affairs. Lots of (innocent?) people end up dying in the cross fire. What's that? You have plenty of guns and ammo stored up just for the occasion? You've got plenty of food stockpiled? You're all prepared? Yeah, I'm sure you will continue to fervently believe that right up until that moment when YOU end up in the cross fire. *Sigh* When will people ever learn?

  Parent