The New Yorker’s David Remnick revealed in an interview with Charlie Rose that President Obama was “obsessed” with the rise of fake news websites.
Remnick described Obama’s concern that the old “fact based universe” had “broken down” and “collapsed.”
“On Facebook a climate change denier looks exactly the same as the science that says that climate change is caused by human beings,” Remnick explained. “A discussion on Breitbart has the veracity to its audience as a conversation on Charlie Rose.”
Remnick explained that Obama felt he had the ability to campaign and talk with the people directly outside of the media, but that people getting their news off Facebook and fake news websites was changing that.
“That’s a new universe,” Remnick said. “He was really obsessed with that.”
Since the election, Obama has talked at length about the rise of social media and fake news, blaming it for the successful rise of Donald Trump.
“If, generally, we’ve got elections that aren’t focused on issues and are full of fake news and false information and distractions, then the issue is not going to be what’s happening from the outside; the issue is going to be what are we doing for ourselves from the inside,” Obama said during a press conference in Peru over the weekend.