The news cycle since the January inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump has been, for lack of a better word, chaos.
And deliberately so.
The political strategy of the current U.S. administration is often referred to as "flooding the zone"; purposefully taking action on multiple drastic emergency measures at the same time, addressing different areas of society. The speed of these measures is designed to make it impossible for the opposition to put together a united front against a single issue.
Caught in the crossfire is a news media that is under-resourced and competing in the press room with new media outlets (independent podcasts and influencers who now have White House credentials).
On top of this is are the frequent and outrageous Donald Trump soundbytes.
It's almost impossible to keep up with the pace of this information. As a media professional who spent the past two decades watching from the front lines how we got to this point, the best course of action is to not keep up. The best course is to slow down.
Stop scrolling is a plea many influencers have to get their views up. It's also a great piece of media literacy.
Stop scrolling and think about the inflammatory post that caught your eye. Before you reactively share it on your feed to keep up with conversation, take a second read. What is it actually saying? Who is the source? And is this information truly helpful?
POTUS is making a lot of big moves and big threats. They're all worth paying attention to because the position yields so much power. The good news is, there are guardrails. There are lawsuits working to restrict DODGE's effort (the organization headed by Elon Musk to reduce government spending). Some executive orders are being struck down by the court system for being unconstitutional.
It's not what President Trump says, it's what his administration does that has real-world consequences. But in order to see what they're doing and actually putting into action you need to slow down, see past the headline, and find the real stories being flooded out from the noise.
Recently I delivered a presentation tracking my career in media and the relationship between legacy news practices and our current social media reality. Click the link below to get this insight and how you can start building important media literacy skills.
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