As of today, there’s a new President of the United States. And the new Commander in Chief’s already testy relationship with the news media means it’s pretty clear that the press will never be the same.
While some people speculated that President Donald Trump might calm down and start to follow the staid ways of Washington D.C., the businessman-turned-politician is keeping true to the non-conformist ways that got him elected.
"This is going to be very dramatic,” said Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “President Trump has ambitions to upend the White House press corps; his press conference last week looked like it could have come straight from a “Saturday Night Live” skit. And he seems to picking up steam on Twitter the last few days, rather than slowing down.”
As a result, some media organizations including Vox and The New York Times are changing the way they cover the president. And McBride suggests American consumers should do the same with their own Media diet.
Specifically, she proposes that people follow President Trump’s twitter feed (@RealDonaldTrump) and have his messages sent directly to their cell phone notification system – just for a couple of weeks. See how to do it here.
Trump likes that the public reads his messages directly via Twitter, and McBride said by seeing his messages unfiltered, you can make up your own mind about what they mean – and about what the media is reporting. But she isn’t suggesting you bypass media all together.
“You can’t just stop there with the twitter stream because his 140-character missives are problematic,” she said. “In addition to the tweets, you have to consume contextual reporting about those tweets. You can search it out through your trusted sources, or you can subscribe to media outlets that vet the tweets. I love the Atlantic’s Trump Tweet Tracker.”
She said this exercise can also help balance out the ‘filter bubble’ that happens in Facebook, where people naturally follow others who are like-minded and, as a result of the stories you read or ‘like,’ algorithms steer your content feed in that direction.
