Saturday, November 21, 2020

What's Up With Twitter

 Can you imagine Walter Cronkite on Twitter? Neither can I.

Twitter is of course that vulgar platform where people send cryptic messages to their followers. The average length of a Tweet is 33 characters – one short, ungrammatical sentence. The platform was specifically designed for superficiality. It’s a place to be snide, snarky and self-promoting, not a place for reasoned debate or reliable information.

Twitter hosts “commentary” by the likes of Kim Kardashian who has 67 million followers and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who has 10 million followers. And CNN anchor Jake Tapper who has three million followers and has posted 227,000 tweets.

Huh?

Yes, that’s right. An anchor of what used to be America’s most trusted news source promotes himself hundreds of times a day with cryptic, snarky Tweets. Many of those cryptic, snarky Tweets seek successfully to provoke cryptic, snarky Tweets in response by President Donald Trump.

Only 41% of the American public trust the news media. Approval ratings for the news media are lower than for the President and for Congress,  A recent poll found with some irony that the most trusted news source in America is the British Broadcasting Corporation.https://theaspenbeat.com/2020/11/20/news-reporters-should-not-be-partisan-tweeters/?fbclid=IwAR3xJSccvb327VvxUvn0cHwFspzGP21Ga529Opthjhd1O_Xpb6eup70TiO8

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