Trump is tweeter-in-chief and ignores the press - Financial Times

Tweeter-in-chief rewrites the media’s rule book
Trump continues to set the news agenda without the need to hold a press conference
DECEMBER 3, 2016 by: Barney Jopson in Washington and Anna Nicolaou in New York
Politicians should campaign in poetry and govern in prose, goes the adage. But Donald Trump has changed little in his shift from campaigner to president-in-waiting. He remains more polemic than poetic and is holding tight to his favourite tool for spreading bombast: Twitter.
This week, it was as if the tweeter-in-chief was back on the campaign trail, the master communicator with smartphone in hand, setting the news agenda for a frustrated press forced into soul-searching over how to cover him.
He used the messaging app to suggest that flag burners be thrown in jail; to moot scrapping the US-Cuba detente; to complain of fraud in an election he won; and to promote a gloating campaign-style rally where he mocked his vanquished
“It’s genius and it’s frightening. It’s communications without the advantage of the frontal lobe. There’s no inhibition,” says Richard Levick, chairman of Levick, a veteran Washington communications guru who has advised multiple governments.
“It’s the 21st century version of the sound bite presidency. He’s the tweetbite presidency. Twitter is by definition not the location where you would spend time to provide thoughtful analysis.”
Had he not nominated James “Mad Dog” Mattis as defence secretary or lured aspiring secretary of state Mitt Romney to a dinner of frog’s legs, one could have forgotten he would soon be president. He did not offer any new policy details as a reminder.
Reporters hungering for something substantive to cover were treated to a mix of teaser tweets — Mr Trump announced a news conference on December 15 about “leaving” his business interests — and pistol whipping.
The president-elect tweeted that CNN was adrift after its “total (100%) support of Hillary Clinton” and slammed the “nasty, dishonest press” at his Ohio rally, pointing a finger at the media pen and prompting jeers from the crowd. “Shall I go on with this a little longer? I love it,” he said.
It’s communications without the advantage of the frontal lobe. There’s no inhibition
Richard Levick, veteran Washington communications guru
Mr Trump has not spoken to reporters or held a press conference since his victory, making the media wait longer than any other president-elect since at least Jimmy Carter. Nor has he accepted the tradition of a “pool” of reporters travelling with him.
His condemnation of the media has succeeded in undermining trust in institutions fact-checking his false claims. On the campaign trail, he even mused openly about rolling back the freedom of the press.
Last week CNN’s Christiane Amanpour called on journalists to “accept that we’ve had our lunch handed to us by the very same social media that we’ve so slavishly been devoted to”. She said: “We face an existential crisis. A threat to the very relevance and usefulness of our profession.”
Susan Glasser, editor of the Politico news service during the 2016 campaign, said: “Trump as well as his Democratic adversaries have the same tools to create, produce, distribute, amplify, or distort news as the news industry itself — and are increasingly figuring out how to use them.
“The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news,” she wrote on Friday.