When will Twitter and the new media stand up to Trump attacks?

The New York Times, the Gray Lady, has had to reach for her smelling salts many a time since Donald Trump rolled into town.

The two could not be different. The Times is meticulous to the point of pedantic, and refined to the point of mockery. Trump tweets with such a brutish disregard for fact and the English language as to make many a NYT sub-editor shudder. You can see why they don’t get on.

But Trump’s campaign against the Times and broadcaster CNN has now widened to characterise all news media as “the enemy of the people” .

Yesterday, in a co-ordinated effort, more than 300 US newspapers —from The Elizabethtown Advocate (circulation 6,000) to the NYT and campaign leaders The Boston Globe — printed editorials condemning Trump for his attacks on them.

Who would have thought that in the US, with press freedom enshrined in the constitution, it would even need to be stated? But it is a sign of how embattled those who back rational, if wordy, discourse have become when the vernacular of Trump bellows over it.

There is one big voice missing from this — Twitter, Trump’s chosen platform. The past 24 hours have been an opportunity for the site, already mired in the controversy of Infowars’ Alex Jones, to restate the American values that allows it to operate in the first place: freedom of the media and its sister value, freedom of speech.

Where is the tweet from @jack, the founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey, in which he composes his own 280-character editorial on the subject, that both defends Trump’s right to the latter, while defending the former? Ironically, like the Gray Lady, he has a piety to him — he believes he cannot intervene, just grab his own smelling salts.

But when the old media is under attack and journalists feel threatened by the dog-whistle insults, it is time for the new media to stand up, or they too are part of the problem.

Post-EU, the cult of learning German

Every so often I load up Duolingo on my phone and brush up on my German. Just after the referendum I noticed a number of friends and acquaintances did the same — a reflexive act of solidarity with the EU.

It seems we British German- speakers will soon die out, given how few of this generation of school-leavers have taken the A-level — a mere 2,000, schade!

It is neither an easy language, nor one that travels well. Still, I quite like the thought that we will all meet in a little café to practise our transitive verbs on each other, a linguistic cult over Kaffee und Kuchen.

Instagram #cash is stronger than #love

There are 1.3 billion people with the hashtag #love on Instagram. As of today there are 6.5 million posts with the hashtag #ad, but expect that number to start rising fast.

The Competition and Markets Authority is investigating whether the platform has too many users passing off paid promotions as just pictures from their glitzy lives.

Household names such as Cara Delevingne do use the ad hashtag, and top players like the Kardashians make a significant part of their hefty living out of it.

But as with any nascent industry — which is what Instagram promotions are — it is difficult to regulate. The social media app has produced a number of stars who exist only there, in a parallel universe all of their own, where our earthly rules don’t apply.

I like to think their other universe is infused with a lot of #love, but what’s becoming apparent is that it is as mercenary as our analogue planet when it comes to #cash.

Some grouchiness at the Groucho

Farewell to Matthew Hobbs, the managing director of Soho’s Groucho Club for eight years, who quit last Friday.

What a circus to have been a master of. The Groucho, started in 1985 amid the ad and film world of Soho, was a haunt of Damien Hirst in his wilder days as well as the A-list of British music.

As with every club of a certain vintage, it has to reinvent itself. But clubs also have members who don’t want them to change. More than once I’ve heard a member in their 60s complain that it isn’t like it used to be, before heading out of the door at 10pm for an early night with a book.