Trump Hijacks News, Media Fails Us - LeBron James Case Study

Aug 04, 2018

Trump Hijacks News, Media Fails Us - LeBron James Case Study

The Pattern



We're going to keep it simple. Here’s the pattern.

An embarrassing news story against Trump appears Trump disses the story with a funny-ish Tweet The media writes about Trump’s diss, rather than the news story

The media knows that Trump brings the clicks. And Trump knows that when he tweets, the media will write about him instead of the actual story.

Win for Trump

Win for News Media (and their goal of getting clicks)

Lose for quality journalism

Lose for the people

The Lebron James Example

In a recent CNN interview, Lebron James addressed various topics, including politics, and said that Trump has used athletics and athletes to split up the country.

Trump gets a jump on the news cycle by dissing Lebron in this late night tweet: “Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!”

Come morning, the media does not talk about the substance of Lebron's interview, instead they talk about Trump's tweet.

Here's a few headlines:

Fox News: Trump tweet slams LeBron James, Don Lemon over CNN interview



Yahoo Sports: President Donald Trump changes mind on LeBron James, criticizes player's intelligence due to CNN interview

ESPN: President Trump takes shot at LeBron in tweet

Oh screw it, here's a screen shot:





And hundreds more...

Summary

F*ck this.

The media is totally being trolled. And the media can't quit their addiction to cheap clicks.

How can we change this? How can we not feed the trolls? How can we not re-funnel all our attention into the gaze of egomaniacs?





Further Reading

We've covered this at different angles before. Here are two.

Trump Fans Racism to Distract from Real Agenda: Money

Trump Bullies Trans Soldiers to Distract You from Scandals





