Newsbeast Responds to Trump's Media Stunt with Media Stunt
Donald Trump officiated the week's biggest eye-rolling contest on Wednesday, when he made his "very big announcement" about President Obama, a ploy for attention grab that inspired The Daily Beast slash Newsweek to launch a ploy of their own: a Donald Trump boycott. Before we get into the specific, let's just get this out of the way. Good idea. Over the course of this election, if not the past four decades, Donald Trump has eaten up an unruly amount of the news cycle with his mixture of trollish swipes at public figures and delusions of relevance. We had a nice little respite from The Donald after his failed presidential bid, and while his latest swing at influencing the election reeked of desperation, it was a little bit funny when it fell flat on its face.
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Enter Newsbeast. As seemingly every other news outlet brushed off Trump's offering to donate $5 million to charity if Obama releases his college transcripts and passport records -- The New York Times didn't even cover it -- the Tina Brown show decided to make it a small spectacle out of their reaction. In a cheekily written column, Daily Beast editor-at-large Lloyd Grove declared a moratorium on Donald Trump coverage, at least for a little while. "Effective immediately, in light of your latest foolish attempt at seeming important, we will ignore you and your hot air for the foreseeable future -- or, at the very least, until after the Nov. 6 election," Grove wrote. "Because, at long last, you have made yourself irrelevant."
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This is an interesting situation to wrap your head around. On one hand, boycotting Trump is a really fantastic idea. Every media mention only makes him stronger, after all. But on the other hand, isn't Newsbeast responding to Donald Trump's trolling by trolling Donald Trump? Surely, Tina Brown would love one of Trump's famous handwritten notes to show up in her fax machine, scolding her for calling him irrelevant? Then, she could turn around and run six blog posts on Trump's gasp-worthy reaction. It's like shaking the controversy tree and then feasting on all of the worm-ridden little pieces of media that fall to the ground.
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Everybody knows that Tina and her crew love to troll. There's the zombie Di cover, crazy eyes Bachmann and whatever it was that Niall Ferguson wrote a couple of months ago. This Trump boycott is only a couple hours old, and we're really not sure how it's going to pan out. Heck, maybe it'll set a precedent and other publications will follow suit. But if Donald Trump does react with a fax or a phone call or whatever, it's going to really test Tina's will not to splash it on her home page. Until the November 6. At least.
