Thread by @SethAbramson

Many journalists don't understand the role they play in keeping politicians honest—which their audience *says* they want. When Trump told us on live TV that the shutdown was his, it became his—it could be reported as the "Trump shutdown." The media now acts like it's a coin flip.

2/ Trump can't be held to his word because US media fails to
"scaffold" coverage: folding into tomorrow's news (in an ineluctable—i.e. fully ingrained—way) the info we learned today. *Every headline* mentioning the shutdown has a *responsibility* to call it the "Trump shutdown."

3/ Once media decides that scaffolding yesterday's *facts* into today's coverage is somehow biased—which any journalism professor will tell you it isn't—you create an environment in which Donald Trump knows in advance that he can lie today with *few media repercussions* tomorrow.

4/ The worst part is this media failure (a) alienates progressives and moderates, (b) betrays journalism, and then (c) produces no benefit whatsoever for American media in its efforts to bring radical conservatives into the fold—as whatever media does, Trump attacks them anyway.

5/ When I turn on CNN and see a clock (say) counting how long the shutdown has gone on, the title atop the bottom left-hand corner graphic should read, TRUMP'S SHUTDOWN. That is *not* biased coverage—it's *literally what the man said* before a *live national television audience*.

6/ I speak for many cable-watchers in saying what I've said here. But cable news producers won't "hear" this criticism from its viewers, or from me, because contemporary media often seems to only hear "criticism" from within—which usually just blames viewers for poor performance.

7/ So let's be clear: Pelosi has NOTHING TO DO with this shutdown. Schumer has NOTHING TO DO with this shutdown. And I'll go further—in many respects Congressional Republicans have LITTLE TO DO with this shutdown. This is Trump throwing a big man-baby TANTRUM—and it's killing us.

8/ In a better media environment, the *facts* of Trump's shutdown would be these: we have a *dangerously mentally unstable president* who's a *pathological liar* beholden to *far-right radicals in media*. He *can't be negotiated with* in good faith and is a *danger to democracy*.

9/ Mainstream media thinks everyone in independent media (particularly digital media) wants Old Media to die. Well I, for one, do *not*. I want Old Media to be *better*. I want to do what I can to *help* it be better. But right now Old Media has circled the wagons and is failing.

10/ Citizen journalists—and citizen journalism—isn't the enemy. Independent, digital and freelance journalism isn't the enemy. Right now *millions* of Americans are saying to corporate media, "*This* is how you can do your job better and more responsibly." We get a middle finger.

PS/ If you're a fulltime journalist, I *beg* you to never forget the difference between conservatives and progressives when it comes to Old Media and digital manifestations of Old Media: *they* want you to be *destroyed*—*we* want to offer loyal, constructive criticism to *help*.

PS2/ Besides being a journalism professor, I'm also a post-internet cultural theorist, so I have #deepthoughts (/s) on media. The problem is, Twitter is a *terrible* place for theory. So I'm simplifying everything here and not addressing "stream-jumping," postpostmodernism, or...

PS3/ ...all the other things digital journalists actually do have to understand, like the digital age's form of "code-switching," which is "reality-switching" (think fifth- and sixth-dimensional reasoning, if you're scientifically inclined). Right now US media is doing nothing...

PS4/ ...to hold its ground in the context of a nation in which *we don't all inhabit the same reality* (past/present/future). It *is* possible to *honestly and responsibly* navigate our world—which isn't at all post-truth, just sixth-dimensional as to truth-value—*if* one learns.

PS5/ "Bothsidesism" isn't just bad journalism—it's nonsense. There are no "sides," there are discrete reality streams. Responsible journalism must inhabit *one stream* while being fluent in the others and making choices that encourage viewers to jump *back* to the "main stream."

PS6/ In digital media, the two *fatal* conditions are to be "between streams" or "unilingual" (only aware of/able to speak to one stream). Essentially, media must use *absolute commitment to one stream* as a way of being legible to *all* streams (not as paradoxical as it sounds).

PS7/ Corporate media is *deductively* built from setpieces like profit margin, audience share, the 24-hour news cycle, and ambivalence toward expertise (expertise is allowable only if entertaining). But to fully inhabit a stream you must build (a) inductively and (b) by *values*.

PS8/ The stream US media needs to inhabit is one in which (e.g.):

a) Only actions matter. Words aren't newsworthy unless performative speech.
b) Sources that lie cease to be sources—onair guests who lie cease to be guests.
c) Yesterday's truth is the foundation for today's news.

PS9/ Once you establish these—and other—values, you perform them, and perform them so consistently you can *perform your performance of them* as a means of speaking to other streams and asking, "What values is *your* stream built upon? Show us. Teach us." (They won't be able to.)

PS10/ It also allows you to *stream-jump*—acknowledge when/where these faulty streams (usually accidentally) perform in a fashion consistent with the "main stream." You then conspicuously perform your *absorption* of these foreign stream elements as a way of winning people back.

NOTE/ This was the unreadable version of what, in future work, will be presented more slowly, visually, and in such language it doesn't read as theory but as a story of where media is now. But if the way it appears highly condensed on Twitter was legible to you, that's good, too.