Obama: Media Critic

Sometimes there are moments when you know that Obama just gets it. Here’s another one of the those moments from Time (via Balloon Juice):

But then Obama made a turn, and went after the press, specifically the group of network correspondents who had interviewed Obama on his trip to Beijing.

But it’s not going to come easily and it is going to require a level of cooperation and a willingness to work strategically together that we have not seen over the last several years. And frankly, this town and the way the political dialogue is structured right now is not conducive to what we need to do to be globally competitive. And all of you are leaders in your communities — in the business sector and the labor sector, in academia, we even have a few pundits here — it is important to understand what’s at stake and that we can’t keep on playing games.

I mentioned that I was in Asia on this trip thinking about the economy, when I sat down for a round of interviews. Not one of them asked me about Asia. Not one of them asked me about the economy. I was asked several times about had I read Sarah Palin’s book. (Laughter.) True. But it’s an indication of how our political debate doesn’t match up with what we need to do and where we need to go.

Pretty pointed stuff, and I have little doubt that the president was actually irked by this at the time. [He also remembers the content of the interviews inaccurately. See update below.] Through both the campaign and his presidency, Obama has made little secret of his disdain for some of the horse-race, tabloid elements of the press corps–though his political and communications staff are not above sometimes exploiting those same tendencies for their own benefit. Obama meets regularly off-the-record and on-the-record meals with columnists who his advisers see as more intellectually substantive (or politically influential). But he has not done the same with beat reporters, whom, as he suggested Thursday, sometimes do a disservice to the country with the journalistic equivalent of ambulance chasing. (In fairness, one man’s ambulances–Town Hall shoutfests! Sarah Palin Facebook posts! etc.–are another man’s news, and columnists also chase them.)

Seriously, after the last two weeks of news media coverage (Salahi obsession, Tiger Woods obsession) can anyone doubt that the media is broken? It’s not just Obama’s Asia trip, either, almost every subject is broken down into some kind of conflict with the media doing little to actually educate people about what is true and what isn’t true. Is anyone really surprised that the public is hopelessly confused about the stimulus, health care reform or climate change?

We hear all the time – newspapers are dying. Newspapers are dying because journalism is dying. Journalism is dying the need for journalism is stronger than ever.