President Obama blames rejection of Democrats on Fox News in bars, talks silencing media opponents
The liberal Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner asked President Obama about Donald Trump’s victory, prompting the President to blame part of it on “Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country.”
Wenner asked Obama “You think it’s still a progressive country?”
“In this election, [white working class voters] turned out in huge numbers for Trump. And I think that part of it has to do with our inability, our failure, to reach those voters effectively. Part of it is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country, but part of it is also Democrats not working at a grassroots level, being in there, showing up, making arguments. That part of the critique of the Democratic Party is accurate. We spend a lot of time focused on international policy and national policy and less time being on the ground. And when we’re on the ground, we do well.” (Emphasis added, The Dispatch)
Obama also seemed to suggest that sharing your policy genius with the elitists at The New York Times doesn’t win elections.
photo screenshot White House video, cropped
“I think it is really important for us, as progressives – set aside the Democratic Party as an institution, but just anybody who wants to see a more progressive America – to think about how we are operating on the ground and showing up everywhere and fighting for the support of folks and giving them a concrete sense of what it is that we think will make their lives better, rather than depending on coming up with the right technocratic policies and sharing that with the New York Times editorial board.”
Wenner even proposed government subsidies for the New York Times, the largest media outlet in the country, and other struggling papers.
“Maybe the news business and the newspaper industry, which is being destroyed by Facebook, needs a subsidy so we can maintain a free press?”
Obama responded: “The New York Times is still making money. NPR is doing well. Yeah, it’s a nonprofit, but it has a growing audience. The problem is segmentation. We were talking about the issue of a divided country. Good journalism continues to this day. There’s great work done in Rolling Stone.”
The President bemoans that there’s simply too much media “ramping up divisions,” the way liberals mourn for a pre-Nineties media with no Fox News and no Limbaugh and no Drudge Report.
“The challenge is people are getting a hundred different visions of the world from a hundred different outlets or a thousand different outlets, and that is ramping up divisions. It’s making people exaggerate or say what’s most controversial or peddling in the most vicious of insults or lies, because that attracts eyeballs. And if we are gonna solve that, it’s not going to be simply an issue of subsidizing or propping up traditional media; it’s going to be figuring out how do we organize in a virtual world the same way we organize in the physical world.”
Sounds like defined “journalists” and censorship.
Check out the full interview here.
