Why the media raced to cover Trump, NASCAR and the Confederate flag

https://www.foxnews.com/media/why-the-media-raced-to-cover-trump-nascar-and-the-confederate-flag

A few points: NASCAR’s only fulltime black driver didn’t initiate the probe of a noose found in his stall, which turned out not to have been targeted at Bubba. NASCAR’s ratings aren’t down. And the president was clearly critical of the league’s decision to ban the Confederate flag at its races.

 

Now it would be easy to say the media are utterly obsessed with this issue. It fuels the journalistic narrative that the president is stoking white resentment with his attacks on angry mobs and left-wing fascism, not to mention his threat to veto a major defense bill if it renames bases that honor Confederate generals.

 hat’s more, the reporters were frustrated by McEnany’s repeated insistence that Trump has no position on displaying Confederate flags.

But most of all, the contretemps reflects the president’s decision to drive the news cycle through Twitter.

Since that social network is the primary way he communicates with his 83 million followers, Trump has the power to change the national conversation with a couple of sentences. Sometimes this chokes off positive coverage he had been getting, to the dismay of his advisers, and sometimes it helps him turn the page from negative coverage.

But the White House can’t very well complain that journalists are creating a distraction when they covering the president’s own words, not when he has used Twitter to make major announcements, push policies, attack opponents and otherwise generate headlines.

There are many well-documented instances of Trump stunning his top aides by tweeting a big decision that they thought they were still debating.