In an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein, President Obama complained about the partisan nature of old media outlets including MSNBC and Fox News and pointed out the benefits of bypassing them in favor of new media.
Obama blamed partisan news outlets for feeding the political divide in the country.
“The balkanization of the media means that we just don’t have a common place where we get common facts and a common worldview the way we did 20, 30 years ago,” he said. “And that just keeps on accelerating, you know.”
Obama cited the “Fox News/Rush Limbaugh folks” on the right and the “MSNBC folks” on the left.
“The point is that technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view,” he said. “That’s contributed to it.”
Citing his January interviews with YouTube personalities, Obama said that the three people who spoke with him didn’t generally talk politics.
His advice to future presidents was to “try to bypass the traditional venues that create divisions and try to find new venues within this new media that are quirkier, less predictable.”
During the interview, Obama praised Klein’s Vox outlet as an example of new media.
“[Y]ou guys are, I guess, for the brainiac-nerd types,” he said.
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