Donald Trump’s Social Media Use Is Key To Sidelining The Press

Donald Trump demonstrates his tweeting skills in his office at Trump Tower in New York, Sept. 29, 2015. Some say it took Trump’s unfiltered, type-anything style to fulfill what digital strategists have long predicted: a campaign built on social media. (Josh Haner/The New York Times)

Here are two articles about President Donald Trump’s use of social media:

Donald Trump’s Social Media Use Is Key To Sidelining The Press
By Dustin Steeve

The president-elect has a social media audience of 45 million Americans. During primetime Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC have a combined audience of 4.66 million.

President Donald Trump will dramatically shift the way the president communicates with the American people. Social media will usurp the press as the president’s preferred communication channel, and his style of communication on it will be more raw than the preprocessed, marketable messaging to which we are accustomed.

To understand the coming shift, you should closely read this transcript of Hugh Hewitt’s interview with Sean Spicer, the man set to become President Trump’s press secretary:

But there’s no question that you see through the platforms that exist right now, whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, he’s closing in like 45 million people that he can have a conversation with, that there are new and modern tools that exist that while we have to sort of do these press conferences because they’re part of the fabric of our country, if you will, there are also some new opportunities that we can be utilizing to bring more people into the process and have a conservation with the American people and not just limit it through the filter of the mainstream media. [emphasis added]

The president-elect of the United States is on social media talking to 45 million Americans directly. More than 18 million people in that audience are on Twitter alone. For perspective, during primetime Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC have a combined audience of 4.66 million people. These numbers illustrate what president-elect Trump understood from the beginning of his campaign: you now reach the American people directly through social media, not indirectly through the press.

Read more: The Federalist

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Tweeting by Trump and the Future of the Media
By Peter Skurkiss

In my travels I come across those who think the tweeting by Donald Trump, first in the GOP primaries, then as the Republican candidate for president, then as president-elect, and then presumably as president is … well … unpresidential, undignified. Granted, such voices typically come from the older end on the age spectrum, which isn’t quite as familiar or comfortable with the new social media technology as the younger set.

But still, there are still many in the hipper generation, especially those in the political world and the media, who don’t like Trump’s tweeting, either. Although not openly admitted, the actual reason for this group’s complaint is that Trump’s tweets have been highly effective in advancing his points and prohibiting the liberal media from controlling the agenda and distorting his message.

Thus by tweeting, Trump has further diminished the liberal media’s already faltering monopoly on the news.

Read more: American Thinker

Image credit: www.thefederalist.com.