Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Repeat as necessary... and  it's always necessary.

Rep. Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) introduced legislation Monday to classify presidential social media posts — including President Trump's much-discussed tweets — as presidential records. 

The Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement (COVFEFE) Act, which has the same acronym as an infamous Trump Twitter typo last month, would amend the Presidential Records Act to include "social media."

Presidential records must be preserved, according to the Presidential Records Act, which would make it potentially illegal for the president to delete tweets. ...

Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar.

But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.

In Trump's own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, our now-president describes himself in a way that Frankfurt could hold up as the quintessential example of a bullshitter. Trump writes that he’s an "I say what’s on my mind" kind of guy. Pages later, he explains that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an honest guy."

If you do things a little differently," he writes of the media, "if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you." The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. "When," he asks "was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!"...

This chart shows U.S. voters' attitudes towards the trustworthiness of the media and/or the president (in percent)

Never since Richard Nixon was in office more than 40 years ago, has a President had such an antagonistic relationship with the media like Donald Trump has today. He considers himself at war with the media and calls outlets whose reporting he disapproves of “fake news”. There seems to be a corrosion of trust in either the President or the so-called Fourth Estate, depending on your political preferences....

During my eight years in the Obama administration, there was an offhand comment uttered from time to time in the hallway after something went off the rails, "It's a communications problem."

The reality is that is the case sometimes, but most of the time the problem is much larger.

Some of the major fumbles of the first few weeks of the Trump administration have been due to the communications team: whether it was the sloppy rollout of the executive order on immigration or the series of television interviews with senior officials who were either unprepared, out of the loop or pompous enough to think they could wing it with a network anchor.

But not all the problems are communications issues....

The next 12 months, the Year of the Fire Rooster, will not be an easy one for President Donald Trump, at least according to a noted Chinese astrologer.

"Trump was born in year of the dog," said Chen Shuaifu, a feng shui master and chairman of the Chinese Feng Shui Association, which has 50,000 members. "The Year of the Rooster will be difficult for him. He might be forced to resign if the worst-case scenarios happen."

“The easiest way for Western people to be lucky or make a lot of money would be to follow Trump’s clothing style and the layout and decoration of his office.”

Chen also said that, as a politician with no experience in public office, Trump should listen to his team and pay attention to "other professional opinions" on policy-making....

Donald Trump doesn’t always speak with proper grammar. And he doesn’t always speak with facts. But he does speak with two other powerful tools: anger, and even more so, volatility.

The data visualization firm Periscopic lays it out in a new data visualization called On The Trump Emoto-Coaster. "If it felt like you were on an emotional roller coaster during this past Presidential election, just look at what was happening to Donald Trump," the team writes. "As shown in 10 of the major speeches he gave from July through December, there’s a rise and fall of intense emotion." As Trevor Noah so cuttingly put it last year, Trump has the unmodulated mentality of a toddler....

What can this small chapter tell us about what’s to come?

That Trump will be what columnist Frida Ghitis of the Miami Herald calls “the gaslighter in chief” — that he will pull out all the stops to make people think that they should believe him, not their own eyes. (“Gaslighting” is a reference to the 1940s movie in which a manipulative husband psychologically abuses his wife by denying the reality that the gaslights in their home are growing dimmer and dimmer.)

“The techniques,” Ghitis wrote, “include saying and doing things and then denying it, blaming others for misunderstanding, disparaging their concerns as oversensitivity, claiming outrageous statements were jokes or misunderstandings, and other forms of twilighting the truth.”...

After feeding 270,000 words into a computer program that studies language patterns, The New Yorker got a result that’s about as awful as the real thing. The neural network studied each of these 270,000 words, as well as how they fit together contextually and came up with, well, this:

The preceding speech was written entirely by this AI language model. Unlike human speech, The New Yorker could dial the program up from one to five, each with its pros and cons. Level one, for example, is fairly accurate speech, albeit with lots of repetition. At level five, we see the program work at full capacity, but what comes out is, believe it or not, actually more nonsensical than Trump’s actual speech.

In my estimation, the real Donald Trump falls somewhere between levels one and two. There’s lots of repetition, a few made up words, and a lot of random nonsense. On his better (worse?) days, he could even approach a level three, but only at times. Interesting, but as the video proves: we’re not quite there yet....

In addition to giving you a weather update whenever you need it, The Weather Channel is known as an unapologetic defender of the idea, backed by basically the entire science community, that climate change is real, and a real threat to life on earth as we know it.

It is unsurprising then, that the front page of its digital site would address President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord, announced today. The way it did, it, however, is a work of art.

It starts in a straightforward enough manner, with a main story whose headline reads “Trump Pulls U.S. Out of Paris Climate Agreement; What That Means.” That may be the point when you notice that the group of stories below are all about climate change, and that the atypical headlines of seven of them collectively send an unequivocal message.

Put them all together, and this is what you get: “So, What Happens to Earth Now? Still Don’t Care? Proof You Should …and More Proof… …and Even More Proof… …Or the Imminent Collapse of a Key Ice Shelf… …or Antarctica Turning Green… …or California’s Coast Disappearing Into the Sea…”...

Under more ordinary circumstances, the cover of the issue for February 13 and 20, 2017—our Anniversary Issue, marking ninety-two years—would feature some version of Rea Irvin’s classic image of the monocled dandy Eustace Tilley. This year, as a response to the opening weeks of the Trump Administration, particularly the executive order on immigration, we feature John W. Tomac’s dark, unwelcoming image, “Liberty’s Flameout.” “It used to be that the Statue of Liberty, and her shining torch, was the vision that welcomed new immigrants. And, at the same time, it was the symbol of American values,” Tomac says. “Now it seems that we are turning off the light.”

Here is a slide show of past Anniversary Issue covers....

Much of the world was united yesterday in solidarity as Women’s Marches took place all over the globe. The protest signs – and there were so many – spoke volumes.

Donald Trump and his forthcoming presidency may be the greatest gift to Washington journalism since the invention of the expense account. His unorthodox approach to politics and governance has vaporized the standard, useful, yet boring script for reporting on a new administration’s doings. At his news conference last week, Trump began the process of washing the press completely out of his fake hair as he castigated CNN and BuzzFeed for reporting on the oppo-research dossier compiled on him. “Fake news,” said the man who has appeared on InfoWars and commended the outlet’s efforts.

Trump’s surrogate Newt Gingrich took to Sean Hannity’s program on Fox to assist in the maiming of the media. Trump and his team “need to go out there and understand they have it in their power to set the terms of this dialogue,” Gingrich said on the Jan. 11 episode. “They can close down the elite press.” Next up came Reince Priebus’announcement that Trump might evict the presidential press corps from the White House for lesser lodging in the adjacent Old Executive Office Building, and Sean Spicer’s admonition that reporters “adhere to a high level of decorum at press briefings and press conferences,” according to a readout of his two-hour summit with the head of the White House Correspondents’ Association. (Or else what, one wonders?)

Now, before the Committee to Protect Journalists throws up the batsign and the rest of us bemoan Trump’s actions as anti-press—which they are—let’s thank the incoming president for simplifying our mission. If Trump’s idea of a news conference is to spank the press, if his lieutenants believe the press needs shutting down, if his chief of staff wants to speculate about moving the White House press scrum off the premises, perhaps reporters ought to take the hint and prepare to cover his administration on their own terms. Instead of relying exclusively on the traditional skills of political reporting, the carriers of press cards ought to start thinking of covering Trump’s Washington like a war zone, where conflict follows conflict, where the fog prevents the collection of reliable information directly from the combatants, where the assignment is a matter of life or death....

Since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump has reportedly skipped out on the majority of his intelligence briefings; this past Sunday, Trump made headlines after sharing false information blaming his loss of the popular vote on mass voter fraud — a claim previously reported by the conspiracy news site Infowars. It’s been widely reported that Trump is an obsessive consumer of cable news — he has himself admitted to receiving at least a portion of his military advice from “the shows.”

But, pundits and chyrons aside, relatively little is known about where the next president will find the news and commentary that might color his time in office. What exactly is Trump’s media diet?
What we know of Trump’s relationship to the modern internet suggests the president-elect rarely browses it himself. Trump campaign press secretary Hope Hicks told GQ he relies largely on Google News printouts from staffers and sparingly reads his own email. And a 2007 deposition suggests that Trump doesn’t use a computer or carry a smartphone during the daytime hours, and often dictates daytime tweets to his assistants.

To better understand Trump’s media consumption, BuzzFeed News turned to the president-elect’s largest source of public proclamations and shared news: Twitter. While Trump’s media consumption and methods appear opaque and unconventional, the stories he chooses to share with his now 16 million–plus followers offer a unique window into the news and commentary that catch his eye...

Our analysis revealed a media ecosystem that appears to largely reinforce and affirm the views publicly expressed by Trump and his closest advisers. The news stories Trump tweets share several characteristics: 1) They often favor sensationalism over facts and reporting; 2) They frequently echo direct quotes from Trump himself or his closest advisers; and 3) They routinely malign his enemies and vindicate his most controversial opinions....

The stories shared by Trump’s account throughout his campaign suggest the president-elect has constructed a powerful online filter bubble that largely flatters and confirms that which he claims to be true....