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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alsop, 1/27/25
Headline: “Too Much News, Redux”
Subhead: “Trump floods the zone in his first week back in power.”
“Exhausted yet?” Last Thursday, The New Yorker’s Susan B. Glasser posed that question at the beginning of a column about the frantic pace of news generated in President Trump’s first half-week or so back in power, before reeling off a long list of major things he had done already, from pulling the US out of the Paris climate accord through the sweeping pardons for January 6 insurrectionists to his ‘pissing match’ with an Episcopalian bishop. Trump ‘loves to drown us in outrage,’ Glasser wrote. ‘The overwhelming volume is the point—too many simultaneous scandals and the system is so overloaded that it breaks down. It can’t focus. It can’t fight back . . .’ ”
“. . . In the summer of 2020, toward the end of Trump’s last term in office, I wrote a column arguing that there was “too much news”—a joking refrain among exhausted journalists that was also literally true, in ways that limited the news media’s ability to cover major stories as extensively as they individually merited; such stories, I wrote, weren’t just coinciding randomly, but existed in ‘a messy ecosystem of cause, effect, suggestion, escalation, and acceleration,’ with one big story triggering another and so on. I wrote at the time that the pace of developments made the news cycle of 2018—which had felt ‘impossibly frenetic’ at the time—feel ‘quaint’ in hindsight . . .”
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/too-much-news-redux.php
