Anyone who’s spent any amount of time on the internet knows how strikingly common it is for people to not only not read past an article’s headline, but to comment on that headline as though the article doesn’t exist. NPR even pulled a brilliant April Fools’ joke with a fake article that baited people into commenting without reading. With Donald Trump’s known television habits—despite his insistence that he’s too busy reading to watch it—and short attention span, it’s no surprise that he’s one of those commenters, and he just effectively pranked himself in the most obvious way.
Yesterday, our sister site, Mediaite, posted their rundown of the 75 most influential people in the news media in 2017. The hosts of Trump’s favorite show, Fox and Friends—which he has been known to live-tweet—landed the top spot, which clearly made Trump feel vindicated in his choices, despite their apparent inability to influence anyone enough to help with Trump’s toilet-circling approval ratings. He tweeted about the distinction this morning—without mention of who made that decision or a link to the post—in his usual smarmy way, but it seems like he forgot to read why the show landed that accolade.
How do we know this? Because Mediaite’s entire reasoning for awarding Fox and Friends the #1 slot was that Donald Trump hangs on the titular friends’ every word, meaning “the topics they cover essentially set the national agenda for the rest of the day.” They are the number one influencers of Donald Trump (as The Daily Dot pointed out, the Fox and Friends crew wasn’t even on the 2016 list), and as Donald Trump has made very clear in the past, he really doesn’t like the idea that anyone else is controlling him, and he bristles at the concept that he’s swayed by all the TV he watches—even when he doesn’t think it’s fake.
But he just proved, yet again, that he latches onto anything he likes in the media and broadcasts it to the world without really thinking it through or even fully looking over the material. Anyway, I’m sure that if someone points this out to him, his response will be very mature self-reflection.
(image: Ildar vector/Shutterstock.com)
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