I agree, and actually I cancelled my subscription and wrote the NYT a letter to the editor over this. I ran an analysis on how many of the front page main headlines were about Trump in the year after his election, versus being about Obama, and it was ridiculous. I don’t have the exact numbers handy but something like 2-3x as many articles written about Trump vs. Obama and basically all negative. I get it, the guy is a clown show, but at a certain point not all of his antics aren’t newsworthy anymore and the media just comes across as obsessed. If anything they’re just playing into the opposition narrative that somehow he’s a good guy who is unfairly being persecuted by the media and that you can’t trust them.
I had so many conversations after he was elected about how the media really needed to play the straight man to his crazy or risk creating a "boy who cried wolf" effect, but that point of view seems to be the exception, as I hear people clamoring for more opinionated NPR pretty regularly. (And NPR has gotten significantly more opinionated over that last handful of years from what I can tell.)
(That said, I do think it makes sense that Trump and those connected to him are creating many more headlines than Obama.)
How much worse does an administration need to be before this amount of coverage is acceptable to you?
I don't think the potential for audience fatigue is a valid reason to start ignoring a president continuously embroiled in legitimate controversy causing irreparable harm to our nation.
You found your limit, I get that, but it's the administration who exceeded your capacity with their newsworthy actions - not the media.
I hate how imprecise and tabloidesque a lot of the "reputable" coverage is. There's a lot to cover. And by any reasonable standard Trump should probably have been embroiled in an impeachment process already. But does that really mean speculation about the Mueller investigation is news and not speculation? I don't think so.
I hate everything you're pointing out as well, but it seems more a product of news and journalism in the 21st century in general - not specific to coverage of the 45th president and/or his administration.
My impression is that quality journalism has been defunded into the toilet now that newspapers and magazines have been displaced by click-bait websites desperate for ad revenue competing with randos spreading nonsense via facebook and twitter.
There really is something to be said about how many column inches and video minutes "liberal" media outlets spent on Trump rather than what the opposition was working on to counter those policies.
That something is "attention = money", apparently.
I agree that many of the major papers that I look at online do a real crap job of doing editor work of their editorials. I also blame most of the people who serve these opinion articles up that they aren't being labeled very well (probably for SEO) it can be really easy to click on a trashy editorial article vs. a expert-in-esoteric-subject editorial article which sometimes are genuinely interesting and useful. At least in the old times when people got physical newspapers it was always clear where the opinion section started and ended but especially right now it seems purposefully mixed together. There should be a label to separate the trash that doesn't even state a thing and/or conclude a thing so it can be properly read as entertainment. The number of articles opinion or otherwise that feel like arbitrary cut and pastes from Slack/IRC spam just feels bad.
