Are these new methods helping or hurting?
Imagine sprinting over to your satellite TV, rushing to turn the dial to just the right channel in time for you to watch a live speech—produced in black and white—being given by the current President over an important public policy. You have waited all week long to receive some news regarding this particular topic and are hoping you tuned-in in time as to not have missed any important information that may have already been given. In the day and age we live in now, such a scenario seems enormously distant and almost even silly. We are accustomed now to a technology-centered world where we can have information delivered to us in a seconds with nothing more than the tap of a finger. As we all know, though, this isn’t how things have always been—not by a long-shot.
In the past, presidential communication with the public was nowhere near as active and prevalent as we see it today. The extent of how the President could communicate with the public reached to dial-in televisions or radio broadcasts where Americans could see or listen to a series of set speeches and/or press conferences. Aside from these methods, the only other option was to simply read about things that occurred once they were printed at a later date in newspapers or other publications. Fast forward to the current presidency and it’s easy to see how many aspects of presidential communication have changed—whether this change was for the better or the worse, though, is still being figured out. Our current president, Donald Trump, has his own very unique and modern method of communication—Twitter. Before him, former President Obama took to Twitter for important announcements and messages about current happenings, but not hardly to the extent that President Trump has. Trump posts tweets on the very popular social media network almost daily; these tweets include statements, questions, concerns, and sometimes there is a bit of gossip and even some singling out of other individuals. Having the president of our country so active on one of the most popular social media outlets to currently exist may seem only fitting for the way our society functions today, but it has both its pros and cons.
One of the benefits of Trump’s chosen method of communication is that the public can feel much more connected with the President himself and feel assured that they are always kept more or less up to date on the latest issues and happenings at the White House and in our country as a whole. Twitter is a very fast-paced media outlet and along with that it is also completely public; meaning even those who don’t have their own individual account can still access Trump’s profile to see everything that he has been posting. Being that it is so fast paced, though, makes its consumers more and more restless and expectant to receive information as quickly and as readily as they please. It only adds on to the issue of always needing instant gratification, and in times of crisis, there is even more pressure than ever before to receive some sort of statement from the President—which can often lead to messages being produced that aren’t up to par when compared to what people are truly wanting/expecting to hear.
Although the internet and its various media outlets are helpful in creating a more open line of communication with the President, they can sometimes create what becomes ultimately more harm than good. With introduction of the internet into Presidential communication, we have seen many instances where too much emphasis has been placed on merely entertaining the public when there should have been more time used towards the presenting of factual information. The sheer freedom of the internet—and especially Twitter—also leads to certain messages getting a bit out of hand and the President putting words into the world too quickly and without taking enough time to think about the effect that the message may have. Situations like this have caused a lot of trouble for Trump and have gained him an enormous amount of backlash, particularly from other members of the Twitter community. Like Obama did before him, “Trump uses social media and his own communication apparatuses to create his own message and bypass the press, but unlike Obama who claimed he was an advocate for the free press, Trump uses the press as his political adversary. He even went so far as to say that the press is the enemy of the people” (Mannerberg 50). Trump is constantly using Twitter to state his opinions (which are almost always negative) on other news sites and to directly attack specific broadcast channels and even individual reporters on their production of what he claims to be “fake news.”
The timeline for methods of presidential communication begins and ends on two very opposite ends of a very large spectrum. Where receiving information was once more organic and spaced, we now live in a society where we are able to know/hear about anything in a matter of seconds whether it’s by scrolling through social media or simply typing in a quick online search. While it has done its part in making our democracy feel more inclusive, it has at the same time created more of a divide among people and presented issues that could have never existed in the past. As our world continues to advance both socially and technologically, changes in presidential communication will only continue to occur—there is so much yet to come.
~
Mannerberg, Lauren. “The Presidency and the Media: An Analysis of the Fundamental Role of the Traditional Press for American Democracy.” University at Albany, State University Of New York, Albany Honors College, 2017, pp. 1–57.
Comments