Buzzfeed News did an analysis of the sites where President-elect Donald Trump gets his news. They took his tweets from the day he started the campaign, June 15, 2015, up until November 17, 2016.
They took 26,234 of Trump’s 34,062 tweets that were sent out during the campaign. Then, they counted the links he tweeted and broke them down by where he got them.
Morning! @lamthuyvo and I combed through all of Trump's tweets and tried to reverse engineer a Trump browser history https://t.co/7t1zB4InaA pic.twitter.com/vmRF7eYba3
— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) December 3, 2016
Naturally, the news site he tweeted the most was Breitbart. This is not surprising considering the owner of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, joined his campaign team in August. This is the same man who says that “spanking your kids more” is a cure for mental health issues. His website makes Fox News look reliable and responsible. He is behind Trump’s “war on the press.”
Donald Trump referred to the National Enquirer back in May when he claimed that Senator Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the assassination of JFK. Of course, Trump believed it and ran with it. Sane people know that these kinds of stories are total trash.
As if these weren’t bad enough, he also gets a lot of his news from Alex Jones and his conspiracy-laden InfoWars show and website. This is the same guy who thinks the Sandy Hook shooting was staged by actors. He also thinks President Barack Obama murdered the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
The stories he retweets have a few things in common:
- They often favor sensationalism over facts and reporting.
- They frequently echo direct quotes from Trump himself or his closest advisers.
- They routinely malign his enemies and vindicate his most controversial opinions.
He does tweet from the mainstream networks every so often. These include Washington Post (26), New York Post (22), The Hill (21), Politico (15), CNN (12), USA Today (10), Bloomberg (7), Forbes (7), CBS News (6), ABC News (5), and NBC News (5) among others. Most of the stories he shared were about polls that were favoring him, obviously. The fact that he is getting his news from some extreme right-wing news sites is a little unnerving. Our next president should get his facts straight.
Here is John Oliver’s expletive-filled take on President-elect Donald Trump:
NSFW
Featured image via Twitter
