On May 26, 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt took to the radio to talk with the American people about mobilizing for war. The address was the 14th “fireside chat” by the president, who during the Depression began the practice of using the airwaves to address Americans directly.
In “No Ordinary Time,” her history of the Roosevelt administration on the home front in World War II, Doris Kearns Goodwin notes that during such talks the public could imagine that they were sitting beside the president in his study.
Kearns Goodwin quotes Richard Strout, a journalist who worked for The New Republic during those years. “You felt he was talking to you,” Strout recalled about FDR. “Not to 50 million others but to you personally.”
The idea of talking directly to Americans (and the world) found its footing anew in 2017 thanks to social media. Twitter alone reaches more than three times as many people each day as FDR reached via the radio.
Just over a year ago, Leslie Stahl of CBS News asked then President-elect Donald Trump whether he planned, after he became president, to keep up the use of Twitter that he had wielded during the campaign.
“I’m going to do very restrained, if I use it at all,” Trump replied. “I find it tremendous. It’s a modern form of communication… It’s where it’s at… I really believe that, the fact that I have such power in terms of numbers with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et cetera.”
As we now know, Trump has not held back. In 2017, he used Twitter to speak to supporters. But he also used it to endorse a hate group, antagonize allies, threaten nuclear war, bully civil servants, and sow discord at home and abroad.
Of course, social media works two ways. When Trump appeared to disinvite the NBA champion Golden State Warriors from the White House, LeBron James, who reaches nearly as many people on Twitter as the president, rebuked him.
Going to the White House is considered a great honor for a championship team.Stephen Curry is hesitating,therefore invitation is withdrawn!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 23, 2017
U bum @StephenCurry30 already said he ain't going! So therefore ain't no invite. Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!
— LeBron James (@KingJames) September 23, 2017
As Christopher Clarey noted on Friday in the Times, social media also gives athletes the means to amplify their messages – an opportunity for activism that many athletes have seized this year. Clarey notes:
What is evident is that the internet’s capacity to make the distant seem personal is not going away. Whether they are asked political questions or not, athletes, like other celebrities, will continue to be able to deliver their messages — be they solipsistic or deeply civic — directly and immediately to the public, no gatekeepers required.
Experts may debate whether a president actually can launch a nuclear strike at the touch of a button. But this year has showed that a president can risk apocalypse at the touch of a smartphone.
If anything, 2017 underscored that we are less likely to experience the moment at a remove. The year also highlighted, as the reaction to the tweet by James – which was liked by seven times as many people as the tweet by Trump that provoked it – the collective intelligence that modern media make possible.
Abraham Lincoln died a dozen years before Thomas Edison invented the first device that could record and playback sound. We infer what the 16th president sounded like by piecing together accounts of those who heard him speak.
Now, thanks to Twitter, we know what the president just watched on cable news.
“They can’t handcuff him,” Maggie Haberman, who covers Trump for the Times, told CNN recently. “They can’t break his fingers to keep him from tweeting. They do tell him: ‘Please don’t do this.’ He does these things anyways.”
Of course, the technology does not release the messenger from responsibility for his message.
As it happens, one of the protests that resonated the loudest this year was also the quietest.
It began a year earlier, when Colin Kaepernick, then the quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, sat during the national anthem, a day after tweeting a message that compared the American and Confederate flags.
At least one reporter captured the portent of the moment. “At a time when NFL players are criticized for not speaking out on social issues, Kaepernick has provided a very significant and conspicuous gesture,” wrote Mike Florio of ProFootballTalk. “As the team noted, it’s his right to do so. But given that Kaepernick opted to make a stand by sitting during the traditional pregame honoring of the country and its flag — which is so tightly woven into the DNA of the NFL — there surely will be a reaction.”