Reuters: Since Trump isn't tweeting much about Puerto Rico, he must be 'scrambling' to convince people he can handle it

There's a term of art in journalism called "burying the lead." (Or if you really want to get hard-core journalism, "burying the lede.") It refers to a poorly constructed news story in which the truly important information is way down in the copy, whereas a bunch of trivial nonsense dominates the top. With that in mind, let's take a look at something from a Reuters story about the Trump Administration's performance responding to the hurricane aftermath in Puerto Rico:

On Tuesday night, Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rossello said he was satisfied with the administration’s relief efforts and called Trump’s performance “excellent.”

Way to go, right? But that lead (or "lede" if you're over 70 and chain-smoke at a seedy bar next door most of the day) is buried. You have to go all the way to the bottom of the story to find it. So what's at the top? The headline will give you a hint: "Trump scrambles to convince Americans he can handle Puerto Rico crisis" Got that? What matters here is not what's actually happening in Puerto Rico, to which the governor gives a thumbs-up, but Trump supposedly "scrambling" to win some self-serving game of public perception. And why does Reuters think he is having a hard time with this? Why, because he's not tweeting about it, really, much, quite . . . or something:

After well-received responses to two major hurricanes that hit the U.S. mainland, President Donald Trump is battling to show Americans he can handle yet another natural disaster - this time in Puerto Rico - despite being caught up in another Twitter war. Caught off guard by the severity of Hurricane Maria’s damage to the U.S. island territory, Trump did not focus on the storm for days, instead launching a barrage of tweets over his view that National Football League players should be required to stand during the U.S. national anthem.

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Trump insisted to reporters on Tuesday that he was not preoccupied with the NFL controversy and that he could multi-task. He said he would visit Puerto Rico on Tuesday. “I have plenty of time on my hands. All I do is work,” he said.

So let me see if I have this straight: Trump is "scrambling" or "battling" to prove he's getting the job done in Puerto Rico, and the proof of this is that he didn't tweet about it much. If he was preoccupied with proving how great a job he's doing, wouldn't he be tweeting about it all the time? And does Reuters understand the difference between tweeting about something and actually doing something? The paragraph I put in bold is an absolutely astonishing one for a supposedly serious journalist to have written. How do these geniuses know if Trump was focused on the relief effort or if he wasn't? They certainly don't know based on the few minutes in the day Trump spent writing tweets. Wouldn't the assessment of the governor serve as a better indication of the federal government's effectiveness than the content of the president's Twitter feed? Is it possible that what the president is spending his time working on during the day is not the same thing he's tweeting about? Or is Reuters just looking for ways to make Trump look like he's scrambling, fumbling and desperate - no matter how absurd their attempt to create the impression may be? Because that's not what journalists are supposed to do, so they wouldn't ever do that.