The Huffington Post
Michael Calderone dissects coverage from the campaign trail, finding a lot of fat and gristle. Though reporters love being able to keep up with every tit-for-tat on Twitter, some are concerned that it means they’re missing the big picture. Calderone writes:
Reporters swarmed the Trump event for the same reason they have pursued and then coughed up almost every other bit of minutiae, no matter how irrelevant or meaningless, around the primaries. In a media landscape replete with Twitter, Facebook, personal blogs and myriad other digital, broadcast and print sources, nothing is too inconsequential to be made consequential.
Political junkies, political operatives and political reporters consume most of this dross, and in this accelerated, 24/7 news cycle, a day feels like a week, with the afternoon’s agreed-upon media narrative getting turned on its head by the evening’s debate. Candidates rise, fall, and rise again, all choreographed to the rat-a-tat background noise of endless minutia.
Meanwhile, the general public is following less campaign news than in 2008. And yet the concerns are not new. In 1988, Newsweek raised concerns about — gasp! — a daily digest of news stories and spin.
Quoted in the story: Jon Ralston (Las Vegas Sun), Jeff Zeleny and Mark Leibovich (The New York Times), Dave Weigel (Slate), Ben Smith (BuzzFeed), Dan Balz (The Washington Post), Ron Brownstein (National Journal), David Gregory and Chuck Todd (NBC), and John King (CNN).
Related: NBC White House Correspondent Chuck Todd: ‘The media is flat; we’re all sort of equal’