Liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, whose prime-time program has overtaken her competitor at ratings giant Fox News, said in a new interview that the news media’s coverage of President Trump’s Twitter messages is “overblown.”
Maddow told Rolling Stone that she doesn’t pay attention to Trump’s social media activity.
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“I mean, who cares?” she said. “It’s like sticks and stones. I am interested in the president denigrating the press — and the judiciary and the intelligence community and law enforcement — because that is important in terms of his behavior as an increasingly authoritarian-style leader, the type of which we have never had before at this level of American politics, period. I am not interested in it because it offends me. When speech becomes behavior, then it is relevant. I don’t watch the press briefing. I don’t read the president’s tweets. In general, ‘The president has tweeted X’ is an overblown story.”
Maddow said Trump’s tweets, which often come early in the morning as abrasive reactions to what he’s apparently watching on cable news, serve to distract the press.
“Trump has mastered the political media by causing you to lose focus and then re-center on whatever it is he’s just said,” she said. “But I’m not interested in what the president has to say.”
