By Situation Theatre 16/7/2019
Journalism degrees will be reduced from three years to a single weekend crash course in the 42,900 tweets of the man who calls himself President.
Now that media companies have discovered it’s way easier to get clicks by outsourcing their article headlines, introductions, bodies, and conclusions to President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed than doing actual journalism, all media degrees around the world will soon be scrapped.
The degrees will be replaced by short courses which will intensively study the 5 Ws of modern journalism:
1. Who did Donald Trump tweet about?
2. What did he say?
3. Where did he tweet from?
4. When did he tweet?
5. Why is he angry this time?
Some media academics have expressed concerns that writing stories which exclusively source Donald Trump’s Twitter feed may impede the Fourth Estate’s ability to hold the world’s most powerful government to account on substantive policy issues.
When it was pointed out that the mainstream U.S. media stopped doing that years ago, they pretty much all said “yeah, fair point.”