Media Richness Associated with the Elected Officials

Posted on by Ashley Moore

Within this current administration, there has been a high amount of discourse with some of the decisions President Donald Trump has made. The Media Richness Theory is basically the way we convey information and in what capacity. In this blog, I wanted to focus on the two elected officials in particular and their communication efforts, Betsy Devos and Donald Trump.

President Trump has faced a lot of backlash after choosing Betsy Devos as Secretary of Eduaction and she has experienced a lot of criticism from a lot of people on her lack of experience with public education and financial aid. She’s even seen here being grilled by Senator Bernie Sanders. When it comes to how she choose to communicate with the public, she rarely tweets but when she does, she faces harsh criticism. Below is a tweet from now confirmed Secretary of Education Betsy Devos:

What’s wrong with her communication in this tweet you may ask, well twitter picked up on it and it caused a frenzy.

Twitter responded almost immediately and her tweet went viral. What does this have to do with the way she personally communicates with the world? Well. She is the Secretary of Education, and being such, twitter reaches out to a wide variety of audiences. To be in charge of the future of education in our country while failing to realize the grammatical errors in a tweet alarmed many of Americans.

In President Trump’s case, he has been known to use twitter without any sense of gatekeeping, something Devos also neglected but he uses this platform of communication to lash out at the people who disagree. See tweet below:

In conclusion, it is my thought that these elected/appointed individuals should use their platforms to provide rich media so that it reduces the uncertainty that is reigning over the current administration.

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