If Trump Tweets It, Is It News? A Quandary for the News Media

The New York Times ^ | November 29, 2016 | Michael M. GRYNBAUM & Sydney EMBER

[Beautiful_Gracious_Skies]

Since Election Day, President-elect Donald J. Trump has proposed a U-turn in American diplomatic relations with Cuba, boasted about negotiations with a major manufacturer, trumpeted false claims about millions of illegal votes and hinted that he might upend current free speech laws by banning flag burning.

As news organizations grapple with covering a commander in chief unlike any other, Mr. Trump’s Twitter account — a bully pulpit, propaganda weapon and attention magnet all rolled into one — has quickly emerged as a fresh journalistic challenge and a source of lively debate.

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?

[Beautiful_Gracious_Skies]

Mixed up the ‘Q’ words. Not all Queers are Queens.

The quandary the msm faces is how to escape the quagmire of being forced to report truthfully.

[arthurus]

There you go.

[stocksthatgoup]

Don’t report it and lose more subscribers

[Chode]

ignore them at your own peril

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

Have been. But, the walls are down in that Trump can make his message available to everyone via a web site. People who like their information homogenized via wire service journalism into leftist propaganda can still pay attention only to “legitimate news” if they wanna. It’s a free country; they don’t have to go to the available primary source.

[Oatka]

If Twitter threatens (if they haven’t already) to censor Trump, he ought to shift over to GAB, his followers will shift with him and Twitter will become another MySpace.

Now if they could only do something similar with Facebook.