During a discussion on MSNBC's Hardball Tuesday, New York Times reporter Amy Chozick encouraged viewers to give Donald Trump a break on his use of Twitter.
Speaking to Trump's use of Twitter as a grievance machine and a cudgel, Chozick said, "I think Trump has changed the game in the way that he communicates with the people and the press and I think the media has to kind of in turn follow."
No, Amy. The idea here is that the press is independent, not followers. By accepting Trump's ridiculous use of Twitter and saying media has to follow, you're legitimizing whatever he says, uncritically. Which, as you'll see, is one of Chozick's specialties.
She went on to "quibble" with the other commentators.
"I think he is using it to speak directly to his supporters, and I think it's something that we have to give him a little bit of credit for," she declared. After criticizing President Obama for not using Twitter like Trump does, Chozick hammered Obama, saying, "You know, you saw that play out in health care."
"So Trump has this very powerful tool to disseminate whatever is going on in his head at the moment to millions of people," she gushed.
Just take a moment to let that sink in. As Media Matters points out:
As Greg Sargent explained in The Washington Post, arms control experts noted that Trump could exacerbate nuclear tensions in an international crisis if his tweets are interpreted incorrectly, such as when he recently tweeted that he wanted to “greatly strengthen and expand” the United States’ “nuclear capability.” Trump has already caused a serious strain in the U.S. relationship with one major nuclear power -- China -- after he bizarrely tweeted that he took an unprecedented call from the Taiwanese President (followed by several tweets attacking China).
Trump has also used Twitter to bully American companies and citizens into submitting to his poorly reasoned demands and embracing his falsehoods. Trump sent the stocks of Lockheed Martin and Boeing into a freefall at various times earlier this month when he tweeted that he was going to cancel Boeing’s contract for the new Air Force One over cost and, later, Lockheed Martin’s over the cost of the F-35 fighter jet. In addition, after Trump falsely claimed he was saving 1,100 jobs at a Carrier factory in Indiana, he used his account to attack Chuck Jones, a union boss at the Carrier plant who pointed out that many people were still losing their jobs, prompting many Trump supporters to send death threats to Jones and his family.
Trump has also outrageously used Twitter to mainstream dangerous hate and bigotry by consistently retweeting white nationalist and “alt-right” Twitter accounts. During his campaign, Trump retweeted several neo-Nazi and white nationalist sympathizing twitter accounts, including one with the handle @WhiteGenocideTM, which according to ThinkProgress, “tweets obsessively about white women allegedly being raped by various minority groups.”
It shouldn't come as a surprise that Chozick is so willing to enable Trump's abuse of Twitter. After all, she was the reporter who uncritically accepted all of the false claims in the Steve Bannon-guided book, Clinton Cash, authored by Peter Schweitzer. Even when she was challenged, she wouldn't back down.
I realize it's hard to find pundits during a holiday week, but Chozick should always be introduced as the reporter who put a lie-filled book called Clinton Cash into the mainstream via the Paper of Record.
