Collective Addiction

Guardian:

From leading columnists to frontline politicians, people are grappling with how to create space to talk about something other than Mueller.

Kyle Pope, editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review, said while print and digital news media have mostly done a good job of lifting their gaze, cable news has struggled to escape a constant daily focus on Mueller and the Trump scandal.
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“My own reading is that both sides are losing credibility – you can only tell me so many times that this is the beginning of the end and it not happen for me to start turning it off. And you can only dismiss things as nonsense so many times without me realising, ‘well you’re not paying attention to anything’.”

He said: “I do think there is too much reactivity. The outrage meter is broken. The calibration of it is all messed up. Little things cause people to go crazy. Things I think are much bigger and more important seem to pass unnoticed.”
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While CNN, Fox News and MSNBC viewers stagger from one Trump scandal to the next, America’s deep social challenges may have been overlooked in the past year, but they have emphatically not gone away.
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New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof conceded in a recent article that like most Americans, he was addicted to the daily Trump minutiae. “In America today, it’s all Trump, all the time. We’re collectively addicted to him. The non-stop scandals and outrages suck us in; they amount to Trump porn.”