{"id":59660,"date":"2020-10-12T06:00:49","date_gmt":"2020-10-11T19:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=59660"},"modified":"2020-10-12T06:17:00","modified_gmt":"2020-10-11T19:17:00","slug":"reporting-on-a-president-who-shouts-and-shifts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/reporting-on-a-president-who-shouts-and-shifts\/","title":{"rendered":"Reporting on a president who shouts and shifts"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Donald Trump went negative and then he tested positive.<\/p>\n

Trump visited chaos on the first campaign debate. Then Covid-19 did the same to his campaign.<\/p>\n

The Donald\u2019s ability\u2014call it a skill\u2014to shout and shift is a central feature of his presidency.<\/p>\n

Trump at full volume is the consistent element that runs from his inauguration <\/a>\u00a0speech in January 2016 (\u2018This American carnage stops right here and stops right now\u2019) to the presidential debate<\/a> with Joe Biden in September 2020. The noise of a great showman proclaiming his greatness. What a ride.<\/p>\n

Beyond the policy crunches and crashes, I\u2019ve approached these four years from two frames: as a viewer and as a journalist.<\/p>\n

The viewer perspective mixes amazement with acknowledgement: wow, this guy is good at what he does.<\/p>\n

As a journalist about to reach 50 years in hackdom, my response has been rueful puzzlement. How do you report on this guy using the normal rules? The debate merely illustrates the tactic he\u2019s deployed every day of his presidency.<\/p>\n

The rules of hackdom (report on the president accurately, nail the facts) say the tsunami of Trump untruths should have washed him away. In July, the Washington Post<\/em> fact-check said Trump had reached the grand total of 20,000 false or misleading claims<\/a>. In the halls of hackdom, all those falsehoods and fabrications should be the end of the story. Of course, it isn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Hacks face cascading crashes. Old models for paying for journalism crumble and burn. The digital disruption destroys the editor\u2019s power as the information gatekeeper. Now the rules of the reporting game\u2014objectivity, the facts, balance\u2014don\u2019t seem to decide the game.<\/p>\n

Trump isn\u2019t interested in policy or theory. And he does \u2018alternative facts\u2019<\/a>, a phrase that epitomises the shimmering, shifting sands on which the very stable genius<\/a> stands.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s\u00a0game theory<\/a> is from\u00a0Dungeons and Dragons<\/em><\/a>. He\u2019s playing as a \u2018chaotic neutral\u2019, \u2018an individualist, neither good nor evil, who cares little for rules or precedence and thrives in spontaneity\u2019.<\/p>\n

The president isn\u2019t a person; he\u2019s a TV character. That insight is from James Poniewozik, chief television critic of the\u00a0New York Times.<\/em>\u00a0TV was born at the same time as Trump, Poniewozik writes, and TV is his soulmate. Trump\u00a0thinks like a TV camera<\/a>:<\/p>\n

If you want to understand what President Trump will do in any situation, then, it\u2019s more helpful to ask: What would TV do? What does TV want?<\/p>\n

It wants conflict. It wants excitement. If there is something that can blow up, it should blow up. It wants a fight. It wants\u00a0more<\/em>. It is always eating and never full.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first presidential debate was TV Trump again crashing into the journos. The hacks had a hard time handling it. The president as TV character is both creature and would-be commander of the viewers. The problem for the hacks was reporting on a debate where the defining line from Biden was, \u2018Will you shut up, man<\/a>? This is so unpresidential.\u2019<\/p>\n

My go-to American media columnist, the ever-sharp Jack Shafer<\/a>, captured the problem of journos trying to intuit the impact of the Trump\u2013Biden debate:<\/p>\n

Never assume that the audience is more easily swayed by mass media messages than you are unless you\u2019ve collected genuine data that proves that point. The people \u2018out there\u2019 are more savvy than we give them credit for.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a member of the press and you want to talk about what the \u2018others\u2019 think, at least take a stab at actually talking to them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My answer to the collect-genuine-data instruction to hacks draws on the work of a very smart Australian, Sean Farrell, an astronomer who hunted black holes and is now a data scientist who hunts anything interesting. He\u2019s working for a tech start-up called Receptiviti<\/a> that\u2019s turning algorithms loose on language<\/a> (emails, tweets, transcripts of speeches) to develop tools the media can use for analysis and reporting.<\/p>\n

The image below represents anger, disgust and joy in tweets targeting Trump around 12 minutes into the debate, when the moderator, Chris Wallace, pointed out that the president had never come up with a plan to replace Obamacare.<\/p>\n

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Image: Receptiviti, <\/em>Timeline of emotional reaction on Twitter to first US presidential debate<\/a>. Used with permission.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the app<\/a> Dr Farrell built to visualise the response<\/a> from Americans on Twitter to the debate, and here\u2019s some of his analysis of emotional reactions as told to The Strategist<\/em>:<\/p>\n