When Trump won, the distinctions between these outlets vanished almost overnight. Content increasingly was organized around furious opposition to Trump. The theme of unending crisis—not just crisis but emergency, a distinction expressed by news agencies via blaring chyrons screaming descriptors like BREAKING—was central to the new coverage concept. The hyper-intense tone was a deliberate strategy. A slow news day was understood as normalizing Trump’s presence in the White House. It was not politically possible for nothing to be terribly wrong, even for a moment. This had to be felt in the
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