Well that's not quite true. If you've got some floating fishing cabin in a sheltered remote cove somewhere up the coast you might be able to escape the constant presence of the Great Orange Bloat. For the rest of us, it's game over.
An op-ed from the New York Times reveals the futility of hoping for Trump-free serenity. Farhad Manjoo tried it for a week. What he discovered is unsettling.
I spent last week ignoring President Donald Trump. Although I am ordinarily a politics junkie, I didn't read, watch or listen to a single story about anything having to do with America's 45th president.
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It wasn't my aim to stick my head in the sand. I did not quit the news. Instead, I spent as much time as I normally do online (all my waking hours), but shifted most of my energy to looking for Trump-free zones.
My point: I wanted to see what I could learn about the modern news media by looking at how thoroughly Trump had subsumed it. In one way, my experiment failed: I could find almost no Trump-free part of the press.
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But as the week wore on, I discovered several truths about our digital media ecosystem. Coverage of Trump may eclipse that of any single human being ever. The reasons have 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.
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 any kind, political or not. He is no longer just the message. In many cases, he has become the medium, the ether through which all other stories flow.
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It wasn't just news. Trump's presence looms over much more. There he is off in the wings of The Bachelor and even The Big Bang Theory, whose creator, Chuck Lorre, has taken to inserting anti-Trump messages in the closing credits. Want to watch an awards show? Say the Grammys or the Golden Globes? Trump Trump Trump. How about sports? Yeah, no. The president's policies are an animating force in the NBA. He was the subtext of the Super Bowl: both the game and the commercials, and maybe even the halftime show.
Where else could I go? Snapchat and Instagram were relatively safe, but the president still popped up. Even Amazon.com suggested I consider Trump toilet paper for my wife's Valentine's Day present. (I bought her jewellery.)
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On most days, Trump is 90 per cent of the news on my Twitter and Facebook feeds, and probably yours, too. But he's not 90 per cent of what's important in the world. During my break from Trump news, I found rich coverage veins that aren't getting social play. ISIS is retreating across Iraq and Syria. Brazil seems on the verge of chaos. A large ice shelf in Antarctica is close to full break. Scientists may have discovered a new continent submerged under the ocean near Australia.
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Unlike old-school media, today's media works according to social feedback loops. Every story that shows any signs of life on Facebook or Twitter is copied endlessly by every outlet, becoming unavoidable.
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Every new story prompts outrage, which puts the stories higher in your feed, which prompts more coverage, which encourages more talk, and on and on. We saw this effect before Trump came on the scene - it's why you know about Cecil the lion and Harambe the gorilla - but he has accelerated the trend. He is the Harambe of politics, the undisputed king of all media.
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In previous media eras, the news was able to find a sensible balance even when huge events were preoccupying the world. Newspapers from World War I and World War II were filled with stories far afield from the war. Today's newspapers are also full of non-Trump articles, but many of us aren't reading newspapers anymore. We're reading Facebook and watching cable, and there, Trump is all anyone talks about, to the exclusion of almost all else.
There's no easy way out of this fix. But as big as Trump is, he's not everything - and it'd be nice to find a way for the media ecosystem to recognise that.
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ReplyDeleteThe only comment I can offer on the Twit in Chief is that if if we all keep talking about him it is just feeding his affliction (and that of his sick supporters). Every time the word T***P is used on line its much the same as previously using the term The H****r Government..... lets try and not feed the beast!
ReplyDeleteWhich is not to say that we should not vigorously oppose his policies......
If your mind has become so befouled and twisted that you believe Liberals hate democracy, you're quite possibly beyond redemption. You and I have no basis for discussion or debate. It's time for you to fuck off.
ReplyDeleteI suspect you're right, Rural. Yet we cannot turn away from this train wreck as I tried to argue in the previous essay putting Trump in his historical place with the strongmen of Turkey, Hungary, Poland and the gaggle of would-be thugs represented by Wilders, le Pen, Farage and others. The right has taken off the gloves. They're actively and quite openly moving to suppress two major cornerstones of democracy - judicial independence and press freedom. We could well be next.
ReplyDeleteThat was quick Mound, I thought the pathetic guy calling the pot pathetic was funny or maybe just pathetic.
ReplyDeleteHey, Willy. This Anonymouse troll has been hanging around a little too much lately.
ReplyDeleteThats what I loved about being blogger. u could tell people to fuck off:0
ReplyDeleteWilly, what? You have to be a blogger to tell people to fuck off? Damn, why didn't somebody tell me that a long time ago, years before they invented blogging? What have I done? Oh, that explains a lot of things.
ReplyDelete