Around the time Trump was inaugurated in 2017, I mentioned to colleagues within the newsroom the place I labored on the time that we shouldn’t cowl every little thing he mentioned or tweeted. Previously, a president’s each phrase was assumed to be a fastidiously chosen sign of future coverage, and was reported as such. Trump, alternatively, clearly mentioned many issues purely to get an increase out of individuals. Reporting on them, I argued, simply fed the flames. Another editor pushed again. “He’s the president,” he mentioned, or phrases to that impact. “What he says is news.”

Eventually, many (if not all) information shops kicked (if not totally) the behavior of amplifying each wild tweet and acquired again to doing their actual job, which was to report on what Trump’s administration was truly doing—a lot of which he himself could have been, at finest, solely dimly conscious of. Over the previous few weeks, although, information habits from the early Trump years have resurfaced round Elon Musk.

Here, as an example, we noticed a slew of rapid-response news stories about Musk’s tweet on December 11 that “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci,” a dig on the authorities’s former chief infectious illness skilled, in addition to at gender variety. Here’s another bunch in regards to the image of his bedside desk with two reproduction weapons on it, and some more about his tweeting a far-right Pepe the Frog meme.

News protection of what Musk is doing at Twitter betrays one other trope of the Trump years. There’s a big class of tales that report with a form of ghoulish delight on strikes that can absolutely—absolutely!—sink the platform in brief order, like alienating advertisers and influential users. Meanwhile, there’s a drumbeat of items from right-wing shops that simply as willfully ignore Musk’s worst behaviors to argue that his slash-and-burn ways are actually the only way to rid Twitter of extra forms and make it profitable, as if it had been such a pit of vipers as has by no means been seen within the annals of company administration. 

This is exactly the best way protection of Trump labored. The liberal-leaning media had been typically drawn to tales confirming the assumption that an individual so clearly unfit to be president would solely reach bringing himself (or the nation) down in flames, whereas the right-wing media handled his evident egomania, corruption, and lack of curiosity in greedy primary coverage points or truly doing the job as at finest irrelevant and at worst important qualities for reforming Washington. There was loads of good reporting happening on the identical time, however these polarizing accounts tended to dominate the dialog. The losers had been the general public, whose understanding of what was truly occurring throughout the nation was pressured by way of incompatible narratives across the habits of 1 unhinged man within the White House.

This is what’s occurring with Musk and Twitter. Conor Friedersdorf within the Atlantic describes a “dysfunctional relationship between Twitter’s new owner and so many of the journalists who cover him … where the least defensible statements and claims on all sides are relentlessly amplified in a never-ending cycle that predictably fuels disdain and negative polarization.” 

Friedersdorf goes on to argue that Musk’s journalistic critics ought to give him extra good thing about the doubt; in any case, he did ban Kanye West, he refused to reinstate Alex Jones, he’s proper that Twitter helped suppress the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop computer that later turned out to be a minimum of partly true, and perhaps his concept of amnesty for suspended accounts shouldn’t be such a foul technique to reset the clock and rebuild total belief within the platform. Maybe? But I feel that strays towards both-sides-ism and misses the purpose.