Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Jon Alsop, 2/10/25
Headline: “Covering the ‘Mad King’ “
Subhead: “Is the press underplaying or overplaying Trump’s early moves?”
“It’s become a truism (including in this newsletter) that Trump has metaphorically flooded the zone since returning to office last month, overwhelming the news media and his political opponents with an apparently strategic torrent of radical actions and statements. . . ”
“As I wrote recently, it’s legitimately difficult for the news media to keep up with all the zone flooding, both metaphorical and real. Various critics, however, have argued in recent days that major mainstream outlets aren’t doing a sharp enough job with the journalistic and attentional resources that they do have at their disposal—that they’ve soft-pedaled Trump’s stated plan to turn Gaza into a beach resort by failing to describe it as ‘ethnic cleansing,’ for instance, or failed to communicate the gravity of Elon Musk’s meddling with the machinery of government by failing to call it a ‘coup.’ ”
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/mad_king_trump_flood_zone_media_criticism.php
