[Infowarrior] - NYU grad student maps POTUS' media ragetweets

[Richard Forno]

Trump Twitter spreadsheet tracks “a perpetual campaign against the press”

By Jonathan Peters, CJR

December 21, 2017

SINCE DECLARING HIS PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDACY in 2015, Donald Trump has posted nearly 1,000 tweets critical of the press.

To be precise, as of this writing, it’s 990 tweets since June 16, 2015. For perspective, if you’re feeling lighthearted: That’s more than the number of goals Wayne Gretzky scored in his NHL career, more than the number of airports in Japan and China combined, and more than the number of Pokémon across all generations of the franchise.

Trump’s prolificacy on Twitter is well documented, and some of his press-related tweets have captured vast public attention. For example, Trump tweeted in July a doctored video in which he wrestled a man whose head had been replaced by the CNN logo. It got hundreds of thousands of retweets.

Off Twitter, of course, Trump has waged a rhetorical war on the press, threatening to sue various newspapers and calling journalists “the most dishonest human beings on Earth,” all while characterizing as “fake news” any story he dislikes.

That’s what prompted an NYU master’s student to start tracking Trump’s tweets critical of the press. “I took it on as a labor of love and hate, and I suffered through his tweets every few days to log them,” says Stephanie Sugars, who is pursuing a joint MA in journalism and international relations. “It seemed important to maintain a record of what has appeared to be a deliberate and sustained campaign to discredit the media as an institution.”

Sugars was working as a researcher at the Committee to Protect Journalists last spring when she created the Trump-tweet spreadsheet that she recently shared with me. She was helping to launch a website that documents press freedom incidents in the US. (CJR is a partner.) Originally, she and others at CPJ thought it would include not only arrests and equipment seizures but also anti-press social media posts.

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https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/trump-twitter-spreadsheet-press-attacks.php