Journalists are the laziest people on planet earth. They spend all their time on Twitter, except for when they're working, which is to say, writing about what people are doing on Twitter. Not just the president or Kellyanne Conway or Chelsea Clinton either. Total randos.
Take an item I saw in the Washington Post this morning:
Let me get this straight: a Twitter user, whose handle you don't even bother to name, posted on Twitter. And another person, also unidentified, "tweeted." This is the definition of fake news. How hard would it have been, with all the resources at your command, to have called someone—anyone—in New York and asked about what happened with the statue? "Joe Ladders, 31, also noticed the strange occurrence. 'Bla, bla, bla, I am answering a journalistic query,' said Ladders." You might have had to make three or four phone calls until you found someone to make your lame point about Drumpf, but trust me, it wouldn't be difficult.
Here are a few more hard-hitting pieces of shoe-leather reporting from our free and independent media.
In Which Someone on The Internet Disagrees With a Politician
In Which a British Tabloid Constructs an Entire Story Out of Someone's Tweets About Cereal
In Which Random People Metamorphose Into 'Students of Body Language'
In Which 'One Twitter User' is Said to Have 'Summed Up' the 'Outrage' the Author Has Just Willed Into Existence
In Which Unnamed People on the Internet Express Their Views Concerning the Hair of Women, Hillary Clinton and Kellayanne Conway Among Them
In Which We Learn that Unnamed People in Poland Also Use Twitter to Express Views
In Which We Learn that Even People Who Want Their Twitter to Be Private Have Opinions About Trans Lives and So Do People on Facebook
In Which the Definition of News is Broadened to Include Random Teenagers' Online Views on Makeup
In Which We Discover That Some People Find Certain Jokes Funny and Others Don't
In Which Twitter is Used to Express Gratitude to Politicians
In Which a Twitter User Suggests that President Obama 'Has a Glow'
In Which a Journalist is Forced to Employ '[Sic]' Because He is Quoting a Rando From Twitter
In Which Opinions About Pizza are Expressed Via Twitter
In Which 'One Twitter User' is Synonymous With 'Everyone'
In Which Giraffes Have Fans on Twitter
In Which We Learn that There is at Least One Thing Twitter 'Can't Handle'
In Which Twitter Itself is 'Furious' About a Candy Bar
In Which Twitter Has a 'Meltdown' Over a Canadian Man's Butt
In Which Twitter Users 'Quip' About a'Masterpiece'
A few years ago I used to complain all the time to anyone who would listen about journalism written directly from press releases, as if anyone sane cared. How I long, in these decadent times, for a good paint-by-numbers hit job or an IRL as opposed to a digital "blasting"!
Better yet, though, there is a great big world out there: people of all shapes and sizes and political views with, I'm sure, a wide variety of opinions about Beyoncé; mountains, rivers, fields, dales, caverns of ice, dark forests, deep black meres, war zones, churches, factories; owls and nightingales, fishes and eels, serpents, lizards, black bears, and wolverines. Go tell me something interesting about it, please. That is journalism.