Trump Tells People to Not Read Newspaper
State of the Fine art
I Ignored Trump News for a Calendar week. Hither'south What I Learned.
I spent terminal week ignoring President Trump. Although I am ordinarily a politics junkie, I didn't read, watch or mind to a single story about anything having to do with our 45th president.
What I missed, by many accounts, was 1 of the strangest and most unpredictable weeks of news in mod political history. Among other things, there was the resignation of the national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, and an "Oprah Winfrey Testify" tape that led to the downfall of the nominee for secretarial assistant of labor, Andrew F. Puzder.
It wasn't my aim to stick my head in the sand. I did not quit the news. Instead, I spent as much fourth dimension as I normally do online (all my waking hours), simply shifted most of my free energy to looking for Trump-free zones.
My signal: I wanted to see what I could acquire about the modernistic news media by looking at how thoroughly Mr. Trump had subsumed information technology. In one mode, my experiment failed: I could detect almost no Trump-complimentary part of the press.
Simply as the week wore on, I discovered several truths about our digital media ecosystem. Coverage of Mr. Trump may eclipse that of any unmarried human being ever. The reasons take as much to do with him as the way social media amplifies every big story until it swallows the world. And as important as covering the president may be, I began to wonder if we were overdosing on Trump news, to the exclusion of everything else.
President Trump is inescapable.
The new president doesn't simply dominate national and political news. During my week of attempted Trump abstinence, I noticed something deeper: He has taken up semipermanent residence on every outlet of whatever kind, political or not. He is no longer simply the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow.
Manifestly, just about every corner of the news was a minefield, just it was my intention to go on informed while avoiding Mr. Trump. I still consulted major news sites, just avoided sections that tend to be Trump-soaked, and averted my eyes equally I scrolled for non-Trump news. I spent more fourth dimension on international news sites similar the BBC, and searched for bailiwick-specific sites covering topics like science and finance. I consulted social news sites like Digg and Reddit, and occasionally checked Twitter and Facebook, just I oft had to furiously coil by all of the Trump posts. (Some news was unavoidable; when Mr. Flynn resigned, a announcer friend texted me about it.)
Fifty-fifty when I establish non-Trump news, though, much of information technology was interleaved with Trump news, and then the overall effect was something like trying to seize with teeth into a fruit-and-nut cake without getting any fruit or nuts.
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Trump's fame may break all records.
All presidents are omnipresent. Merely it is probable that no living person in history has ever been equally famous as Mr. Trump is right at present. It'southward possible that not fifty-fifty the nearly famous or infamous people of the recent or distant past — say, Barack Obama, Osama bin Laden, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Michael Jackson, Muhammad Ali or Adolf Hitler — dominated media as thoroughly at their peak as Mr. Trump does now.
I'one thousand hedging because at that place isn't information to straight verify this annunciation. (Of course, there are no media analytics to measure how many outlets were covering Hitler the twenty-four hour period he invaded Poland.) But in that location is some pretty good coexisting prove.
Consider data from mediaQuant, a business firm that measures "earned media," which is all coverage that isn't paid advertisement. To calculate a dollar value of earned media, it first counts every mention of a particular make or personality in just about any outlet, from blogs to Twitter to the evening news to The New York Times. Then it estimates how much the mentions would cost if someone were to pay for them as advertising.
In January, Mr. Trump broke mediaQuant'south records. In a single calendar month, he received $817 meg in coverage, higher than whatever single person has ever received in the four years that mediaQuant has been analyzing the media, co-ordinate to Paul Senatori, the company's chief analytics officer. For much of the past four years, Mr. Obama'due south monthly earned media value hovered effectually $200 meg to $500 million. The highest that Hillary Clinton got during the presidential campaign was $430 one thousand thousand, in July.
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It's not just that Mr. Trump's coverage beats anyone else's. He is now chirapsia pretty much everyone else put together. Mr. Senatori recently added up the coverage value of one,000 of the world'due south best known figures, excluding Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump. The list includes Mrs. Clinton, who in January got $200 million in coverage, Tom Brady ($38 meg), Kim Kardashian ($36 million), and Vladimir 5. Putin ($30 million), all the way down to the one,000th most-mentioned celebrity in mediaQuant'due south database, the actress Madeleine Stowe ($1,001).
The coverage those 1,000 people garnered last calendar month totaled $721 million. In other words, Mr. Trump gets nearly $100 million more in coverage than the side by side 1,000 famous people put together. And he is on track to match or beat his January record in February, according to Mr. Senatori'south preliminary figures.
How do we know Mr. Trump is more talked about than anyone else in the past? There are now more than people on the planet who are more connected than always before. Facebook estimates that about three.two billion people have net connections. On boilerplate, the people of Earth spend about eight hours a 24-hour interval consuming media, co-ordinate to the marketing research firm Zenith. And so almost by definition, anyone who dominates today's media is going to be read about, talked nearly and watched past more people than ever before.
"From a media perspective, information technology'due south pretty clear," Mr. Senatori said. "The sheer volume, and the sheer amount of consumption, and all the new channels that are available today show that, yeah, he'south off the charts."
Merely shouldn't we all be thinking virtually Trump?
Mr. Trump is a historically unusual president, and thus deserves plenty of coverage. Still at that place'due south an argument that our tech-fueled modernistic media ecosystem is amplifying his presence even beyond what's called for.
On most days, Mr. Trump is 90 percent of the news on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and probably yours, as well. But he's not 90 percent of what's important in the earth. During my break from Trump news, I establish rich coverage veins that aren't getting social play. ISIS is retreating across Iraq and Syria. Brazil seems on the verge of anarchy. A big water ice shelf in Antarctica is close to full break. Scientists may have discovered a new continent submerged under the ocean almost Commonwealth of australia.
In that location's a reason you aren't seeing these stories splashed beyond the news. Unlike sometime-schoolhouse media, today's media works according to social feedback loops. Every story that shows any signs of life on Facebook or Twitter is copied incessantly by every outlet, becoming unavoidable.
Scholars have long predicted that social media might alter how we choose cultural products. In 2006, Duncan Watts, a researcher at Microsoft who studies social networks, and two colleagues published a study arguing that social signals create a kind of "inequality" in how nosotros choose media. The researchers demonstrated this with an online market place for music downloads. Half of the people who arrived at Mr. Watts's music-downloading site were shown simply the titles and band proper noun of each song. The other half were likewise shown a social signal — how many times each song had been downloaded by other users.
Mr. Watts and his colleagues found that adding social signals changed the music people were interested in. Inequality went upwards: When people could see what others were downloading, popular songs became far more than popular, and unpopular songs far less popular. Social signals also created a greater unpredictability of outcomes; when people could see how others had picked songs, the collective ratings of each song were less likely to predict success, and bad songs were more likely to become popular.
I suspect we are seeing something similar this effect playing out with Trump news. It'southward not that coverage of the new assistants is unimportant. It clearly is. Just social signals — likes, retweets and more than — are amplifying it.
Every new story prompts outrage, which puts the stories higher in your feed, which prompts more coverage, which encourages more than talk, and on and on. We saw this consequence before Mr. Trump came on the scene — information technology'due south why y'all know well-nigh Cecil the lion and Harambe the gorilla — but he has accelerated the trend. He is the Harambe of politics, the undisputed male monarch of all media.
The book isn't sustainable.
It's but been a month since Mr. Trump took office, and already the deluge of news has been overwhelming. Anybody — reporters, producers, anchors, protesters, people in the assistants and consumers of news — has been amped up to xi.
For now, this might be all correct. It'southward important to pay attention to the federal government when big things are happening.
But Mr. Trump is probable to be president for at least the adjacent four years. And it's probably not a good idea for just nearly all of our news to exist focused on a single discipline for that long.
In previous media eras, the news was able to discover a sensible rest even when huge events were preoccupying the world. Newspapers from World War I and II were filled with stories far afield from the war. Today's newspapers are besides full of not-Trump manufactures, but many of us aren't reading newspapers anymore. Nosotros're reading Facebook and watching cable, and there, Mr. Trump is all anyone talks most, to the exclusion of virtually all else.
There'southward no piece of cake fashion out of this ready. Only as large as Mr. Trump is, he'due south not everything — and it'd be nice to discover a way for the media ecosystem to recognize that.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/22/technology/trump-news-media-ignore.html
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