Scolds media

Obama scolds media for enabling Trump

The job of a political reporter, Obama said, is 'more than just handing someone a microphone.'

By Sarah Wheaton

President Barack Obama spoke directly to political journalists on Monday night with a message that was part pep talk and part scolding to the Fourth Estate.

Obama delivered the keynote address at a dinner for this year’s winner of an award for political reporting named for the late Robin Toner, who served as The New York Times’ top political correspondent before her death in 2008, shortly after Obama’s historic election.

Obama used the speech as yet another chance to decry the politics of Donald Trump, this time highlighting the media’s role in the mogul’s fact-indifferent campaign.

“It’s worth asking ourselves what each of us — as politicians, as journalists, but most of all as citizens — may have done” to create the polarized political atmosphere, Obama said. “Some may be more to blame than others for the current climate, but all of us are responsible for reversing it.”

Obama’s White House, in the name of transparency, has made unprecedented levels of data available to the public at large, just as it has been pioneering in its efforts to get around the press corps’ filter and speak directly to the public through livestreams, social media and targeted interviews with niche publications. On Monday, he lamented the breakdown of that filter, however, when it comes to Trump, though he did not specially use the Republican frontrunner's name.

The job of a political reporter, he said, is “more than just handing someone a microphone.”

Obama continued, “It’s to probe and to question and to dig deeper.”

Obama expressed sympathy for reporters who are grappling with the changes in their industry, acknowledging that market forces and changing technology make it harder than ever for those driven by a sense of small-D democratic mission to fulfill it.

“The choice between what cuts into your bottom lines and what harms us as a society is important. You have to choose which price is higher to pay, which cost is harder to bear,” Obama said.

“Good reporters,” he continued, “find yourselves caught between competing forces, I’m aware of that. You believe in the importance of a well-informed electorate. You’ve staked your careers on it. Our democracy needs you more than ever. You’re under significant financial pressures as well. So I believe the electorate would be better served if your networks and your producers would give you the room” to cover substance.

“In today’s unprecedented change in your industry, the job’s gotten tougher,” Obama said. “The appetite for information and data flowing through the Internet is voracious,” Obama said, yet “we’ve seen newsrooms closed, the bottom line has shrunk. The news cycle has as well.”

That creates pressures, he said, for journalists to “fill the void and feed the beast with instant commentary and Twitter rumors and celebrity gossip and softer stories. And then we fail to understand our world, or one another, as well as we should.”

America’s free press is not government-funded, the president noted, so news organizations must pursue profits. But they have “an obligation to invest a good chunk” of those profits back into the newsroom, he added, “and to not dumb down the news and to have higher aspirations for what effective news can do. Because a well-informed electorate depends on you.”

Obama has spoken derisively of political coverage that emphasizes the horse race, and in his view, that drives cynicism. He also repeated complaints on Monday about media creating “false equivalences,” saying that if a politician called the world flat, the media would dutifully post the “he said-she said” and bury scientific consensus about the globe’s shape in “paragraph five or six.”

The president did praise some journalism: the meticulous, pain-staking investigation detailed in the movie “Spotlight,” for example, and a POLITICO project to fact-check five hours of Trump speeches (though he did not cite the publication).

Obama also had praise for himself. He noted that he’d found old newspapers from right before his election in his home in Chicago.

“If you go back and see what I said in 2007 and you go back and see what I did, they match up,” Obama said. That was in part because “people asked me really tough questions.”

Obama also noted the press conference he held with Raul Castro last week, a first in the communist nation, and he recalled a conversation he had with Vladimir Putin about an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

Obama suggested he’d been taken out of context, a problem Putin might not confront.

“Unlike you, Vladimir, I don’t get to edit the piece before it’s published,” the American president recounted telling the Russian leader.

Obama has taken steps in recent years to improve his relationship with the press. He replaced Jay Carney, a press secretary known for angrily calling journalists who wrote stories he didn’t like, with Josh Earnest, who has worked to create a more open, collegial rapport. And the administration has made an effort to show the inner workings of the White House, including a database of all official visitors. But the Obama Justice Department’s tough tactics with journalists in leak investigations remain a sore point.

Obama offered a note of reassurance, telling journalists that their work has helped him keep tabs on the sprawling federal government.

“You should not underestimate the number of times that I’ve read something that you did, and I’ve called somebody up and said what’s going on here,” Obama said.

And to those feeling like their efforts to hold politicians accountable are falling on deaf ears, Obama said, “You have to believe that me getting it right matters, that it’s not just sending something into the void.”

At the same time, Obama acknowledged, “in an era in which attention spans are short, it is going be hard because you’re going to have to figure out ways to be more entertaining.”

A year ago, Hillary Clinton used her Toner award keynote address to call for “new beginnings” with the press, just as news about her use of a private email server was starting to come out.

“No more secrecy, no more zone of privacy — after all what good did that do me,” Clinton said.

Alec MacGillis of ProPublica was this year's Toner Prize winner.