If that’s a political story, almost anything involving both a politician and a celebrity is a “political story.”

Think of all of the times that Trump tweeted something about a celebrity, or that celebrities tweeted about Trump. I don’t think it can be right to say that these were all newsworthy events.

But suppose that we restrict consideration to only those cases in which Trump tweets something about a celebrity (rather than a celebrity tweeting something about Trump). I think that even this more limited set of cases is rarely news – and almost never news worthy of the front page.

In this case, what was being tweeted about was politics. It's the content that makes it political, not who tweets it. The President was directly rebuking athletes for taking political positions that the President did not like, and they were responding to that criticism.

Yes: the content was political. The president was directly rebuking celebrities for taking positions that he didn't like, and one of them was responding directly. But that sort of thing happened almost every day in the Trump administration. On average, it happened more than once per day. And it generally happened via the shallowest of forums: Twitter.

It shouldn't be front-page news if it happens so frequently and through such shallow exchanges. Really newsworthy events are happening every day, but instead of covering them, the Times chose to put a Twitter squabble on its front page. I don't think that we can justify its decision just by noting that the content was political and that the parties to the dispute were prominent.