The handwringing, oh the handwringing my brothers and sisters in journalism and punditry have been doing as the era of Trump (if not Trumpism) winds down.
What, pray tell, will we do without the great orange one to kick around anymore?
Nobody will need MSNBC the way they needed it the last four years, proclaimed Vanity Fair. CNN and MSNBC are fretting over a post-Trump future, went the New York Times’s headline.
I’m just so bored with all this talk of boredom on the part of the news media.
The way I see it, journalists can get back to covering the dull, workaday stuff like Jeff Bezos getting richer or some congressman’s booty call, or a nursing home fire — as opposed to the raging dumpster fire that has been the Trump presidency. And from a news consumer’s point of view, won’t it be nice for a change to not cringe while scrolling Twitter or the Times’s homepage in anticipation of our dear leader’s latest public embarrassment?
But seriously, not only have the Trump years been a low point for our country —they’ve brought out the very worst of the media’s tabloidesque instincts. Trump is nothing if not a circus act for our times, commanding center stage in a world gone bonkers, his every lament disseminated for wide public consumption via Twitter, his emissaries at Fox News and Breitbart, and, yes, even the so-called legitimate press. And that is a shame for the trade of journalism, which has allowed itself too often to get dragged down in the muck of Trump. The spectacle that is this president is matched only by the nightly, hyperventilating coverage of him by the cable networks. (By the way, if you think that’s going to end just because Trump’s departing the White House, you amuse me.)
Even if it were the case that all Trump coverage would come to an abrupt halt as of January 20th, I, for one, would be quite pleased to be bored for a while for a change, as both a perpetrator and a victim of this thing we so lovingly call “content.” At least until four years from now, when we’re all covering President Donald Trump Jr.
