By Megan McArdle
Columnist |
October 28, 2022 at 2:19 p.m. EDT
Until it happened, I didn’t want to go out on a limb and say that Elon Musk would definitely buy Twitter. I am reluctant to make firm predictions about anything Musk does. So, until he actually walked into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, I treated his acquisition of Twitter as a thought experiment, like Schroedinger’s cat — maybe it is alive! Maybe it is dead! The only way to find out is to wait and see.
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But now he’s gone and done it, and it’s time to start grappling with the problem that might soon be upon us: What to do if Musk allows former president Donald Trump to rejoin Twitter?
By “us,” I mostly mean journalists. If you are not a journalist, there is an easy way to handle Trump’s tweeting: ignore it. Sure, I understand that you might be anxious about his vile provocations, but your fretting about every stupid tweet isn’t going to change anything. I promise that if Trump does something that you urgently need to know about — like getting elected president — we in the mainstream media will hasten to tell you about it.
ADVERTISING
There is no need to follow Trump’s Twitter feed, or to talk about Trump’s Twitter feed, or to in any way acknowledge that Trump’s Twitter feed exists. All your attention does is encourage him.
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But we in the media are not so lucky; we will have to keep an eye on a resurrected Trumpian Twitter account. It behooves us to develop some guidelines for deciding which of his pronouncements are newsworthy.
Our historical answer for that has been “all of them.” And fair enough; he was a candidate for president, and then he was the leading Republican candidate for president, and then he was the president. By long-standing journalistic tradition, whenever such a creature opens his mouth (or his phone), what follows is newsworthy.
Trump cannily exploited those traditions to get himself billions worth of free media. Every news cycle was about him, and some awful or ridiculous or provocative thing he said. It is no exaggeration to say he climbed into the presidency on the shoulders of the hundreds of journalists who kept treating his pronouncements as matters of epic importance, even if it had been tapped out one-handed while schmoozing around Mar-a-Lago.
This was, to state the obvious, not the effect we were hoping for. Now that Trump may get his Twitter account back, we have to decide whether we’re going to do it again.
I’m afraid that we will. Trump knows how to outrage us, and knows, too, how many of us will rush to tell our readers exactly how outraged we are. Of course, this only pleases him, much in the way that a toddler having a tantrum rejoices to see Mommy turn purple, and at some level we know this. But we cannot seem to stop ourselves. “It’s news,” we chant, as we provide him with yet more free media.
But in point of fact, it’s no longer news that Trump likes to say terrible things on social media. It isn’t news that he likes to threaten people, attack important civic institutions, tell baseless lies and rub elbows with bigots. No one in the country — in the world — can possibly be unaware of the kinds of things Trump likes to tweet or the revulsion this produces in establishment media.
It is time to create a new journalistic tradition that will be harder for him to exploit. Rather than leaping to condemn his every pronouncement, we should treat Trump’s Twitter account the way we’d treat some random account with five followers and a penchant for rancid verbal attacks: as if it were generally beneath our notice.
Yes, I understand that his outrages have real power, unlike the random nobody — before he was banned, our former president had tens of millions of followers. But all our fact-checking didn’t make much impression on his fans. Mostly, what we ended up doing was confirming that Trump was the most important thing in the entire world and direct tens of millions more eyeballs toward his misbehavior.
We’d have done far better to only report on the tweets that actually conveyed new information — which is what we should do now.
If Trump announces a new policy, or an endorsement, or his own plans to run for president — we should of course cover that — as we would cover any campaign. But his deliberate provocations should be just as deliberately ignored.
Columnist |
October 28, 2022 at 2:19 p.m. EDT
Until it happened, I didn’t want to go out on a limb and say that Elon Musk would definitely buy Twitter. I am reluctant to make firm predictions about anything Musk does. So, until he actually walked into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, I treated his acquisition of Twitter as a thought experiment, like Schroedinger’s cat — maybe it is alive! Maybe it is dead! The only way to find out is to wait and see.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
But now he’s gone and done it, and it’s time to start grappling with the problem that might soon be upon us: What to do if Musk allows former president Donald Trump to rejoin Twitter?
By “us,” I mostly mean journalists. If you are not a journalist, there is an easy way to handle Trump’s tweeting: ignore it. Sure, I understand that you might be anxious about his vile provocations, but your fretting about every stupid tweet isn’t going to change anything. I promise that if Trump does something that you urgently need to know about — like getting elected president — we in the mainstream media will hasten to tell you about it.
ADVERTISING
There is no need to follow Trump’s Twitter feed, or to talk about Trump’s Twitter feed, or to in any way acknowledge that Trump’s Twitter feed exists. All your attention does is encourage him.
Follow Megan McArdle's opinionsFollow
But we in the media are not so lucky; we will have to keep an eye on a resurrected Trumpian Twitter account. It behooves us to develop some guidelines for deciding which of his pronouncements are newsworthy.
Our historical answer for that has been “all of them.” And fair enough; he was a candidate for president, and then he was the leading Republican candidate for president, and then he was the president. By long-standing journalistic tradition, whenever such a creature opens his mouth (or his phone), what follows is newsworthy.
Trump cannily exploited those traditions to get himself billions worth of free media. Every news cycle was about him, and some awful or ridiculous or provocative thing he said. It is no exaggeration to say he climbed into the presidency on the shoulders of the hundreds of journalists who kept treating his pronouncements as matters of epic importance, even if it had been tapped out one-handed while schmoozing around Mar-a-Lago.
This was, to state the obvious, not the effect we were hoping for. Now that Trump may get his Twitter account back, we have to decide whether we’re going to do it again.
I’m afraid that we will. Trump knows how to outrage us, and knows, too, how many of us will rush to tell our readers exactly how outraged we are. Of course, this only pleases him, much in the way that a toddler having a tantrum rejoices to see Mommy turn purple, and at some level we know this. But we cannot seem to stop ourselves. “It’s news,” we chant, as we provide him with yet more free media.
But in point of fact, it’s no longer news that Trump likes to say terrible things on social media. It isn’t news that he likes to threaten people, attack important civic institutions, tell baseless lies and rub elbows with bigots. No one in the country — in the world — can possibly be unaware of the kinds of things Trump likes to tweet or the revulsion this produces in establishment media.
It is time to create a new journalistic tradition that will be harder for him to exploit. Rather than leaping to condemn his every pronouncement, we should treat Trump’s Twitter account the way we’d treat some random account with five followers and a penchant for rancid verbal attacks: as if it were generally beneath our notice.
Yes, I understand that his outrages have real power, unlike the random nobody — before he was banned, our former president had tens of millions of followers. But all our fact-checking didn’t make much impression on his fans. Mostly, what we ended up doing was confirming that Trump was the most important thing in the entire world and direct tens of millions more eyeballs toward his misbehavior.
We’d have done far better to only report on the tweets that actually conveyed new information — which is what we should do now.
If Trump announces a new policy, or an endorsement, or his own plans to run for president — we should of course cover that — as we would cover any campaign. But his deliberate provocations should be just as deliberately ignored.
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