Interesting. Thanks.

It doesn't rain where I live, but I still take the road side with my kids even though they are old enough that I hope they don't just run into traffic.

I can think of plenty of examples of tweets that reflect policy. I don't know what it means for a tweet to drive policy. I also disagree about whether Trump is shaping policy. You would not have had a travel ban if anyone else had been President.

Another example counter to my point would be his stupid assertion that he won the popular vote which led to this moronic voter fraud commission.

Normally a statement by the president is meant to accomplish some policy goal of the administration. This is only true of a vanishingly small portion of Trump's tweets.

Yeah. That's a good example.

If at first you don't succeed, juke the stats.

Has this thread gone insane, or is it all Clovis?

"Trump's tweets should be ignored."
And if you got injured or killed because of one?

"Trump's tweets don't drive policy."
GOP is trying to do a straight Obamacare repeal this weekend because of Trump tweeting for them to do it.

"Trump isn't a ratings machine."
Ummm, he's POTUS without policy.

"Tweets from Trump are meaningless."
He shut off almost all access to him, BUT tweets.

Almost all statements in the last day about tweets show gross ignorance about the content of Trump's tweets. The only consistent theme, policy or not, is how they all push a propagandist narrative favoring him personally as Dear Leader.

Who is supposed to stop all the bribing and extortion and flat out corruption if the people turtles, spineless weaklings, and orange buffoons in charge of policing it are all doing it?

trump tweets are way over covered. All Trump has to do to squash a bad story is to tweet something; the easiest is to just bash some media member.

The big $ Republican donors have started to ramp up the pressure until they get exactly what they want so WAAF.

Note: Chris Wallace is MIA from Fox News Sunday for yet another week after last exposing the bull**** from Trump and his lawyer. Anyone know where he is? The internets do not seem to.

Trump made it so almost everything he says is on Twitter.

The important points you're making are:

1) Trump himself is way over covered.
2) Trump is way over believed.
3) Trump is massively evil.
4) The cancer needs to be stopped.

This is a string of assertions with no evidence. Provide some evidence.

The way you handle the tweets, journalistically, is to decide what percentage of your airtime/print space non-policy tweets from POTUS are going to get. 5%, 10%, whatever. You give it that, and no more, regardless of what he says. This means no Jeffery Lord vs. Van Jones debate over whether it's okay to tweet that Mika is bleeding from the face, or whether liberals are being silly little snowflakes who can't take a presidential joke.

You sacrifice the ratings that stupid people give stupid segments like that for the good of the country and instead, the anchor reads off what he said, puts it into context of how absurd it is that POTUS is doing this - trying to avoid letting it ever become normalized. You have a panel of like four sane people across the political spectrum (aka a Romney type, not a Lord or McEnany) all react to it in 15 seconds or less. You give the whole thing two minutes of a 60-minute newscast, of which 42 minutes are probably content and 18 minutes are commercials, so you've given it ~5%. AND NOT THE LEAD. You can mention it among the headlines, tease it (you can use it a little for ratings) and come back with it in the second break.

That's what I'd do. I think there's value for the viewer to never let it become normalized or ignored, and to always have it being condemned by a respected, sane conservative.

I haven't watched the news since the start of the WSOP, but I'm assuming it's been a lot of yelling back and forth over tweets while liberals are exasperated that conservatives support this stupidity. If that continues, RIP America. We need our news networks to do their jobs, and allow that they may not get the maximum ratings. If they do their jobs, the ratings during impeachment should be even better and then I have no problem with them spending 50% of the coverage on his insane tweets from his sinking ship if they really want to.

This is a really good idea.

Getting maximum ratings is their job, tho. Covering "serious" news is just how they differentiate themselves from other entertainment outlets.

you write in another post that his tweets are unimportant and only policy statements matter or something along those lines.

policy in a vacuum is only one of the things that are interresting from a president or a person of high power. from his tweets we can infer what his convictions are, who does he concider his friends and enemies, how does he perceive the world around him and who does he perceive himself to be. everything he outputs is information that we use to extrapolate to the future or to understand him better. most official persons are trying to hide alot more of themselves from the public because its too hard to have a consistent self presentation if you share too much of yourself.

specific example,

i recently laid out a speculative argument that trumps mental state was in decline and he might be uncapable of sitting through his full term. one of my reasons backing this argument was joe and mika recently pointed out that they had seen marked difference in trumps cognitive ability the past two years. but this argument of mine was challenged by a couple of persons, one of them Trolley who points out that there is recently broken out heavily strained relation at the top of society, namely between joe&mika and trump himself, and therefore joe and mikas evaluation of trumps cognitive abilities should be discredited and be taken with a grain of salt.

this is an example of where we learn something about the presidents relations to other prominent individuals in society through his tweets and use this information to guide our arguments about his (mental) health and therefore about his ability to remain in power.

so his tweets might look very dumb to us at a first glance but they inform us in ways that we might not always be fully concious about.

Joe and Mika have to say he's "declined" because they were buddy buddy with him for like a decade and stopped only when it was abundantly clear that he was and is a narcissistic, racist idiot.

Um. Yeah. The ratings ARE the evidence. Nielsen not only provides the raw estimates of how many people are watching, but also gives a detailed account of how many people tuned in to your channel at a particular time. They tell you which channels the added viewers flipped from. And they tell you the channels that the viewers you lost went to. From there, you just figure out what you were airing when viewership went up and what you were airing when viewership went down. So do more of this and less of that. That's television.

You are aware trump is the president right?

He shouldn’t be posting memes,gifs or silly videos at all.

He doesn't seem to understand why exceptions to the 1st Amendment exist.

A Reddit user who wrote about stabbing Muslims is claiming credit for Trump’s CNN video

I'll sign off on this. They have to stop caring about the bottom line. They have to be willing to sacrifice a piece of that pie in exchange for doing the right thing for the country, for the people. Bite the bullet and ride it out long term because it will pay off. They are too scared to do it though. They don't understand that losing a few battles can help you win the war. We live in this ****ing society where instant gratification is a staple and everyone including the media needs the wins now now now. It's backwards.