Commentary: Can Cable News Learn To Ignore Trump's Tweets?

Whether you are a supporter of Donald Trump, a cable news anchor or a ticked-off member of #TheResistance, you likely feel that President Trump does a spectacular job of using his tweets to distract controversy and drive news coverage. It's not a coincidence that you can count on him to tweet out some inflammatory tweets early most Monday mornings. He understands instinctively that those tweets will derail an entire news cycle as cable news producers find guests to dispute his statements or warn about the dire consequences of his latest threat.

But the truth is that in about 80 percent of the cases, the tweets could have been ignored with no real consequences to the country or to even the Trump Administration. Cable news channels in particular treat every presidential tweet as worthy of dissection. Part of it is the result of news channels that have still not figured out how to deal with a continuous fire hose of conflicting and often inflammatory tweets. But sadly, I suspect that cable news channels cover Trump's tweets with such dedication because those are segments that are easy to book. If the President tweets something about the special prosecutor or a political rival a news channel segment producer can book the show quicker than you can say "paid contributor." Choosing from that pool of willing members of the contributariot might make things easier on an editorial level. But I can guarantee that you'll learn everything you need to know about the latest Trump tweet in the first five minutes of the four-hour news block devoted to it later in the day.

I ran across this brief mention in Friday's  CNN's "Reliable Sources" newsletter and it did remind me that a few media outlets are beginning to work out the most effective way to do editorial triage when it comes to President's tweets:

To be fair, if you're TBS, it's relatively easy to ignore Presidential complaints about Samantha Bee. Once you begin to realize the comparative short attention span of the President, it's increasingly wise to wait out any minor controversy. The next time he turns on his television, he'll see some new shiny object that distracts him and like a dog chasing the reflection of a flashlight on a wooden floor, he'll be off and running to his personal phone to send out his next tweet.

Ignoring the flood of presidential tweets is somewhat more difficult if you're a cable news outlet. You can't just pretend Trump isn't tweeting. Some of this messages are newsworthy and have to be given the appropriate amount of scrutiny you'd give the same news if he had said it in a press scrum. But there are ways of diffusing the volume of his efforts and ensure that the daily news cycle is driven by actual news, not random presidential recaps of "Fox & Friends" talking points.

The first step is to resist the temptation to rehash Trump's tweets just because he sends them out. History has shown they are no predictor of actual policy and in many cases they don't even reflect administration beliefs. Many of this tweets are just reflexive and spending multiple segments covering them is like deciding to put together a panel discussing whether the President believes poo is truly divine simply because he stubbed his toe on the couch and yelled "Holy Crap!" It's okay to mention the tweet, add a few sentences of context and move on. 

There is this wide-held belief that Trump's opponents tune in to see these panels of paid guests railing against whatever latest misguided tweet the President sends out. I'd argue that audiences would be more likely to tune into a cable news network that de-emphasized the tweets in favor of other more relevant news.

The other reason for giving less attention to presidential tweets is that by spending so much airtime dissecting them, everyone's attention is turned away from other news. That certainly seems to be the game plan of the president, who has a visceral ability to know just how to use 280 characters to send the press scurrying off in the direction of his choosing. There have been lots of hot takes written about the ways President Trump seeks to drive the news cycle. This would be a good way to wrestle back some of that control over the talking point of the day.

The other way to turn around the news cycle dynamic is by highlighting the news that those in power (Republican and Democrat) are seeking to obfuscate. I'd order up a daily "Here's the story they don't want to talk about" segment and use that as way to both cover important stories and illustrate how those in power are trying to spin the news coverage. 

The discussion about the best way to cover the presidential tweets is part of a larger discussion about how news organizations in general and cable news channels specifically cover this new world of news driven by social media and other less familiar methods of communication. But that's a discussion for another post....

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