Too Much News, Redux

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“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.” On Friday morning, Brian Stelter, the author of CNN’s media newsletter, shared this observation, and noted that journalists are having to “get back on Trump Time.” (“Conveniently,” Stelter added, “Trump has licensed his name to a watchmaker.”)

In the half-week or so since Glasser wrote, the pace hasn’t let up, and a long list of things Trump and his administration have done (or tried to do) is once again necessary: suggesting withholding wildfire aid from California unless the state implements voter-ID laws; mulling doing away with the entire Federal Emergency Management Agency; a suite of executive orders taking aim at abortion; a new assessment from the CIA favoring the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic originated in a Chinese lab (though officials played down the new administration’s influence over this); canceling Anthony Fauci’s publicly funded security detail; purging well over a dozen departmental inspectors general in apparent violation of federal law; the implementation of a ninety-day freeze on virtually all foreign aid; the accompanying implementation of an order for US-funded mine-clearing groups to stop work; proposing to “clean out” Gaza by resettling its inhabitants in other Arab countries; ending a Biden-era hold on the supply of two-thousand-pound bombs to Israel; the final confirmation of a former Fox News host accused of sexual abuse (which he denies) as defense secretary; starting to use military aircraft for deportations; threatening to start a trade war with Colombia (the country, not the university) after its government refused to let the planes land—and, apparently to this end, posting a (fake) image of Trump looking menacing in a fedora next to a sign reading “FAFO” (or “Fuck around, find out”)—before Colombia backed down; and on and on and on. 

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; looking back now on the summer of 2020, the word “quaint” doesn’t feel quite right—that moment was, of course, mid-pandemic and –racial reckoning—but even so, many of the past week’s headlines feel as if they would have been unimaginable back then. The first major story I referenced in my 2020 column was a decision by the Supreme Court to strike down an anti-abortion law in Louisiana. Since then, of course, the court has overturned Roe v. Wade, remaking the national landscape for reproductive rights. The abortion orders that Trump signed last week were substantively familiar from his first term but nonetheless constituted an apparent quick break with his more recent promises to leave abortion policy to the states. How many people noticed?

I noted in 2020 that the “basic rhythms” of the news business aren’t designed to cope with deluges of huge stories: whatever the day’s news, it must be stretched or shrunk to fill roughly the same number of newspaper column inches or cable news hours; the internet, of course, theoretically offers near-infinite space for news coverage to expand, but many digital formats—from homepages to newsletters—themselves have spatial limits, and that’s before we get into strained newsroom resources and apparently diminished audience buy-in, as Stelter pointed out last week. These constraints make it hard for the news media, as a collective apparatus, to communicate proportion. We have tools for organizing stories by importance—back in 2020, I noted that the New York Times had run thirty-three banner front-page print headlines in less than six months, smashing even its election-year average—but the constant blare of headlines, as I noted, can have a “flattening effect, making it harder, over a long period of time, to distinguish actual news from attention hustling.” The problem of proportionality is recurring now. A story previewing Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s potentially radical plans to “target vaccines” should he be confirmed as health and human services secretary appeared about halfway down a major Politico newsletter on Friday; yesterday, the CIA lab-leak story made the front page of the Times, but only in brief form at the very bottom. Needless to say that in the summer of 2020, both these stories would have been earth-shaking.

Of course, it isn’t 2020 anymore. The bigness of stories can change over time; if Kennedy’s vaccine plans should still be of urgent concern, even if we aren’t in the midst of a pandemic these days, the lab-leak story, while still important, perhaps now merits a lesser billing than before. And yet it’s not the case that the stories getting the biggest billing over the past few days have always been the most important. The same Politico newsletter led on Saturday with a dispatch on Trump being “nice” to California leaders during a trip linked to the recent fires in the state. The print edition of the Times, for its part, hasn’t run anything approaching a full-width A1 headline since the day after Trump’s inauguration—and has given significant space to stories including a mural in memory of the late basketball star Kobe Bryant, the Microsoft Excel World Championship, and a “scientifically optimized” recipe for cacio e pepe. 

Have we all just allowed ourselves, this time around, to be drowned by Trump’s deluge? The answer isn’t so easy. I’d question the importance of a story about Trump’s demeanor toward LA leaders (reports of his newfound niceness hold him to the lowest imaginable standard, and almost always prove to be credulous anyway), but there’s nothing wrong with curated mixes of news reserving room for the touching, or quirky, or delightful. (If professional journalists struggle to survive under the deluge, imagine how news consumers must feel.) If constant banner headlines can have a flattening effect, maybe keeping them in reserve for now is a welcome sign of journalistic restraint—a part, perhaps, of an effort to be less reactive to Trump’s every outrage, and to try instead to more efficiently isolate and synthesize the really important stuff. (As far as I can see, the Times has not yet covered Trump’s “FAFO” meme at all.) And yet, when so much stuff is really important, any of it falling through the cracks of the news cycle is regrettable. And it’s hard to escape the feeling that Trump benefits from this state of affairs in a way few other politicians would. Return to the list in the second paragraph of this newsletter, substitute “Biden” for Trump, and just imagine how big and long-running a story each individual item would have been.

In Thursday’s newsletter, I wrote about how Trump has long benefited politically from making himself the center of attention, and referenced a thought-provoking recent podcast discussion on the topic between Ezra Klein, a columnist at the Times, and Chris Hayes, an MSNBC host who is promoting a new book about attention. Over the weekend, both men weighed in again with important insights on the same subject. In a column yesterday, Klein made the case that “something has felt different about the early days of President Trump’s second term, and I think it’s this: Attention, not cash, is the form of power that most interests him.” In an interview with Semafor, Hayes, meanwhile, spoke about the media’s inability “to set a focal agenda when it pertains to Trump,” and how this “is part of a much broader set of circumstances and dynamics.” Part of the problem, Hayes said, is precisely that the news cycle is accelerating. After the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, “there was a week-long manhunt and that was the number one story in the country for weeks, maybe a month.” This year, “a dude with an ISIS flag kills 14 Americans on New Year’s in New Orleans, and that’s metabolized and gone from the national consciousness in maybe 24 hours.”

Taken together, these two insights get to something important about the problem of journalistic attention, specifically, in the early days of Trump’s second term. Trump has actively sought this out since retaking office, hosting a series of press conferences with reporters, including aboard Air Force One on Saturday after holding a celebratory rally in Las Vegas that itself was surely designed to corral attention. But journalistic attention, as I noted above, is not in practice an infinite resource, and so the more of it that Trump seeks, the less of it there is to go around; in other words, if he benefits from ruling our attention, so he does from dividing it. Whether this is intended or not, it has the effect of slipping historically radical and abnormal policies and behaviors past us before we can get a firm grip on them—and Trump, as I’ve written before, certainly seems to have an instinctive, decidedly old-school grip on the finite nature of journalistic attention. (It was no surprise, when he fired all the inspectors general last week, that he did so late on a Friday night.) On Thursday, I wrote that Trump’s second term so far “feels less than his first like an exercise in pure attention domination: government by radical, planned executive order, and less so by tweet.” This might appear to contradict Klein’s comment, for example. But I think the ideas are compatible. It’s not necessarily that there’s less chaos or rage-posting this time around, but it does make up a lesser share of the things the press should be paying attention to. Not all of that stuff is dominating our attention. And again, it’s reasonable to see this as being by design.

Glasser put it well: “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.” The system here could refer to any number of things—from the federal bureaucracy as a whole to the immigration system specifically—but the news media is a part of it, too, in the sense that it is a key institution for providing accountability and also, perhaps, because Trump and his allies clearly see us as part of the establishment they wish to tear down. (Whether or not you see the media’s job as being to fight back, and it’s a complex question, it is certainly our job to focus on things.) In the early hours of Saturday morning, Trump spoke explicitly in such terms, posting online that the media are “the Enemy of the people” and taking direct aim at CNN and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. This might have appeared to embody an old Trump contradiction: bashing the media at the same time as courting and feeding off it. But maybe this was never such a contradiction. The attentional dynamics of Trump’s second term might so far feel different in certain ways from those of his first, but perhaps the best way of interpreting them is itself an old one: the infamous idea of flooding the media zone with shit.

During his weekend swing through Vegas, Trump stopped by a casino craps table, a visual that got widespread media attention. At one point, a reporter shouted a question about the inspector general firings, but he ignored it. According to a pool report, journalists in attendance were “chastised” by a craps player. “I’m rolling here,” he said. 

Other notable stories:

• The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich reports from Greenland, the autonomous Danish territory that has found itself at the center of an international media storm since Trump started making noises (again) about making it a part of the US. Leibovich tried repeatedly to interview Múte Egede, Greenland’s prime minister, but found him elusive: “Like many other minor global figures who become overnight attention magnets, Egede had seemed at first exhilarated by all the interest, then overwhelmed, and then regretful. Watching his recent public appearances from afar, I had noticed his demeanor sometimes shift from the burly confidence of a local wunderkind to the nervousness of someone fully aware that his actions were being observed closely.” (Be sure to read to the end for the input of, erm, Paul McCartney.)

• Recently, we noted in this newsletter the controversy surrounding a forthcoming documentary casting doubt on the provenance of the iconic “Napalm Girl” image taken during the Vietnam War; the documentary was reportedly set to make the case that a stringer may have taken the photo rather than Nick Ut, the AP staffer who has always been credited with it, but Ut vigorously denied this—going so far as to try to block the film from airing—and the AP said it had investigated the matter and found no reason to doubt Ut’s authorship. On Saturday, the film finally premiered at Sundance. After a representative viewed it for the first time, the AP reiterated its finding but said that it would investigate further—should the filmmakers lift restrictions on reviewing their evidence.

• For CJR, Yona TR Golding profiled Chen Liberman, a high-profile TV journalist in Israel whose coverage has “straddled a line” since Hamas attacked the country on October 7, 2023 and Israel responded by bombarding Gaza, a story minimized by much of the Israeli media. Liberman “fit neatly into the mainstream media: She started her career, as many Israeli journalists have, as a member of the military unit that produces news,” Golding writes. In her view, the war in Gaza has been an act of self-defense. “But she is also one of only a handful of prominent reporters in the country who have even occasionally challenged incendiary anti-Palestinian speech.” 

• In 2020—after the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, in whose offices Islamist terrorists had murdered twelve people five years earlier, republished cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad ahead of a trial in the case—a Pakistani man attacked two people with a meat cleaver outside the magazine’s former offices, not realizing that it had moved. (The victims, who both survived, worked for Premières Lignes, a different media company.) Last week, the assailant, who was apparently influenced by Pakistan’s strict anti-blasphemy laws, was sentenced to thirty years in prison.

• And, for the Financial Times, the journalist Samantha Weinberg reflects on her decades of correspondence with a convicted murderer in California whose guilt Weinberg had assumed before she began to have doubts. “Every reporter I know tells themselves stories—about how what they’re doing is in the public interest or somehow adds to the sum of human knowledge. Sometimes it’s true. Often it’s a bit more complicated,” Weinberg writes. “We mostly bury the power inherent in our job beneath layers of self-justification, or toss it around lightly. The power—largely undeserved, certainly in terms of moral superiority—is intoxicating.”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.