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

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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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:20PM

    by TheGratefulNet (659) on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:20PM (#435428)

    brawndo, its what plants crave!

    we are not very far from that. scary close to that, in fact.

    we thought bush was the ultimate in dumbing down of america, but we were wrong. a new bottom has been defined and I fear we will see it being reached and lowered even more ;(

    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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  • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Entropy on Thursday December 01 2016, @06:26PM

    by Entropy (4228) on Thursday December 01 2016, @06:26PM (#435573)

    Yeah. Not only do we feed them more as they reproduce, we got them healthcare that useful people have to pay for them making sure only the stupid survive. Pretty sure Pres. bin hussein was the bottom of the bucket in that respsect.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @06:46AM (#438650)

    You talk like a fag and your shit's all tarded.