Sunday News Pops on Twitter (All media are social)

Yesterday was surprisingly busy as a news day with my Twitter feed overflowing with rapid-fire commentary on the news. There was news about earthquakes, floods, health care, the president, the NFL, and just a bit about the new Star Trek show on CBS.

This prompted me to ask my students this morning what they saw as the most important or interesting news from the weekend.  I had them all write their choice down before people started speaking so that we would get an honest read.  Got a sometimes predictable/sometimes surprising list of stories and sources of the news.  Here’s what my whiteboard looked like at the end of class:

What my students saw as the most significant/interesting/noticed news of the weekend.

And here is a sampling of what my Twitter looked like throughout the day.  I don’t claim it as being representative, only that it represents what I was seeing. (It’s possible that the original tweets that I saw RTs of date back to Saturday):

President Trump started off the day with a series of tweets blasting NFL players for taking a knee during the national anthem to protest treatment of African Americans by police. It was picking up a thread that got him a lot of cheers at a political rally in Alabama last week:

These were predictably followed with responses from supporters and critics.

Activist Henny Wise had a tweet storm on the subject of respect for the flag with an illustrated series of posts on the US Flag Code.  Here’s a couple of them.

and

Dallas Maverick’s NBA team owner Mark Cuban had this to say to people who were tired of the mixture of sports and politics:

Conservative journalist/commentator Rich Lowry opined:

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, an outspoken conservative who has been pretty consistently critical of the president and very active on Twitter, wrote:

This prompted some fascinating responses.

Religion writer Rachel Held Evans pointed Sen. Sasse, who has a doctorate in history, back to the writings of Martin Luther King, Jr.

• Here’s a link to a post I wrote a couple of years about about King’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

And from one of Senator Sasse’s history professors at Yale:

Interestingly enough, though Sen. Sasse often engages with some of his most vocal critics on Twitter, he has not, to the best of my knowledge responded publicly to Dr. Gilmore.

Center-right journalist/commentator David Frum, who is former speechwriter for President George W. Bush, argued that the players shouldn’t be giving President Trump attention by kneeling:

Presidential historian Michael Beschloss took a subtle approach in noting that today is the anniversary of Congress’s approval of the Bill of Rights:

And one can sympathize with media studies professor Chuck Tryon who tweeted:

Of course, there were other things in the news as well:

But perhaps the most neglected story of the day was this: