Chat, Are We Cooked?
The first hundred days of Trump 2.0 brought forth more material than infinity reporters typing on infinity laptops for infinity years could possibly report. The “flood the zone” strategy—brought to us from the mind of Steve Bannon, the MAGA media strategist—has been around since at least 2018, but now, as the New York Times put it, “the flood is bigger, wider and more brutally efficient”; the same article also included the phrases “overwhelming sensory overload,” “drinking from a fire hose,” and “gasping in outrage.” Each of these metaphors hit the news media directly, and hard. And then, on March 11, they gushed into the Signal chat of one journalist in particular.
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Related Knowledge Center: The White House vs. the press
Whether it’s the Des Moines Register’s publication of an unfavorable election poll, a routine edit of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, or the Associated Press’s decision in its authoritative stylebook to continue to use “Gulf of Mexico,” Donald Trump and the White House have used executive authority and legal reprisals in an effort to punish and suppress press coverage that runs contrary to the administration’s preferred narratives.
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