"Mr. President, is you OK? Is you good? 'Cuz I wanted to know."

January 25, 2015 10:25 AM

In addition to posting the State of the Union to Medium before the end of the press embargo, the Obama administration has delivered another sop to the young whippersnappers of today by having the president get interviewed by three stars of YouTube: comedian GloZell, designer Bethany Mota, and vlogbrother Hank Green.

You can watch the interviews, read takes on how they went from Hank Green himself, the WaPo, NPR, and the NYT, and enjoy some grousing from FOX and Bloomberg Politics's response to said grousing.
posted by Going To Maine (22 comments total)

In retrospect, I could have beefed this up more - there's a whole story here that Hank Green hits pretty well (and that you can see in the disdain of the the NYT article) about the failure of old media to acknowledge the strength of new media. But I'd also like to kind of focus on the interviews themselves.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:35 AM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Previously upsetting the old media: Barack Obama between two ferns, previously, and how it came to happen.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:57 AM on January 25, 2015

I was impressed with these interviews. The questions were all thoughtful and frequently challenging, and while a lot of Obama's answers were the sort of non-answers our current political climate demands, you could still tell he was taking the questions seriously and he wasn't trivializing them. I appreciated that.

And I think Hank Green's Medium article gets at some pretty good points. He's right that he, and other Youtube stars, traffic in honesty. I wouldn't consider myself a huge fan of Hank Green, in that I don't follow everything he does, but I've seen enough of his stuff that I do trust his authenticity. I trust that he's not in some huge corporation's pocket, I trust that he's not beholden to a political party, I trust that he's a smart, thoughtful guy who's not interested in scoring political points. I do not extend that kind of trust to mainstream media, and I literally cannot remember a time that I ever did. (The last newscaster I had any sort of trust in was Peter Jennings.)

This complete lack of objectivity and representation in cable news has degraded the legitimacy of news media as a whole. Young people have absolutely no faith in people sitting at desks on television anymore. It’s gotten so bad that the most trusted news show among people under 40 is on Comedy Central. The Daily Show, it should be noted, spends as much time mocking the news media as it does talking about the news, further decreasing young people’s trust of the news. The news is losing an entire generation.

I think Green is right about this. The news lost me a long time ago, and I doubt it's ever getting me back as anything other than the kind of viewer who checks in every so often for weather reports and local news. I know the Daily Show isn't news, not really, but I absolutely trust it more than I trust CNN or Fox News or MSNBC. You know why? Because the Daily Show remembers. It remembers history, it remembers what politicians said, it remembers what the media said before whatever its current position is, while the rest of the media seems content to exist in a present that's somehow totally disconnected from the past. The Daily Show isn't perfect about that, obviously, but it's doing better than the actual news on that score.
posted by yasaman at 12:29 PM on January 25, 2015 [27 favorites]

...the media seems content to exist in a present that's somehow totally disconnected from the past.

Or the future. Kinda like a Turing machine without any processing between the reads.
posted by Mental Wimp at 12:41 PM on January 25, 2015

Dignity of the office... I guess Obama should be giving foreign leaders backrubs on an aircraft carrier before exclaiming "Watch this drive!"
posted by tonycpsu at 12:45 PM on January 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

Legacy media mocking people like Hank Green feels like General Motors laughing at Toyota circa about 1973.

Aside from that, Hank's read is absolutely correct. The legacy news media have sacrificed trustworthiness in the name of ratings by being either completely shallow(*) or shameless propagandists. Screw them and their aging, fearful demographic.

(*) Faux outrage at YouTube stars asking legitimate questions of the president followed immediately by the latest "Inflategate" speculation.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 12:50 PM on January 25, 2015 [8 favorites]

~The legacy news media have sacrificed trustworthiness in the name of ratings...

That's what happens when news departments are required to make a profit. I was lucky to have lived during a time when news was allowed to operate without such constraints. Anyway...

I applaud Obama for this sort of outreach. He's laying groundwork for his party for the future. That said, until the young start voting in numbers that actually affect things, elected government and mainstream news media are going to continue to treat them as novelties, no matter how many YouTube channels they populate.

I get that everyone is frustrated and all, but the hip, snarky "haw, haw, lookit the media dinosaurs" attitude isn't going to change anything. Votes do. That's the way the system works.


~Screw them and their aging, fearful demographic.

The youth of today will become the aging, fearful demographic of the future, and will similarly be derided by the youth of the future. Lather, rinse, repeat.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:35 PM on January 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

The youth of today will become the aging, fearful demographic of the future, and will similarly be derided by the youth of the future. Lather, rinse, repeat.

I don't doubt this as a general truth about generations but their is something particularly awful about the current batch in that no other generation before has so readily and thoroughly fucked over the one that came after it. They got snakes and ladders with mostly ladders and we got almost all snakes.
posted by srboisvert at 1:59 PM on January 25, 2015 [11 favorites]

Legacy media mocking people like Hank Green feels like General Motors laughing at Toyota circa about 1973.

While in some ways true, I kind of think Legacy Media and New Media will just become complements to one another. After all, radio and TV didn't replace print media. Also, I'm reminded of Anchorman 2, which is not a very good sequel, but did get me thinking that there was a time when CNN did not exist. Did old media laugh and scoff at CNN like what CNN and Fox are doing to YT now?
posted by FJT at 3:04 PM on January 25, 2015

I liked the Hank Green piece, and think that he's right on track with a lot of the talk about institutional and cultural signifiers losing their vale as indicators of legitimacy. But I think that he might be overselling the impact of trust on an individual level.

I wasn't around for Cronkite, but I have a hard time buying into the better times narrative around old media. It seems just as likely that the fact that only three choices existed would create pressures to blandly cater to a broad audience. When the infrastructure grew to allow hundreds of choices, having a smaller but more devoted audience became a winning strategy.

So maybe the agency of young people choosing to reject the old is the driving force here. Or maybe it's just that the environment is significantly different.
posted by graphnerd at 3:18 PM on January 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

The youth of today will become the aging, fearful demographic of the future.

If they can ever catch up with that demographic, that is: [The FOX median viewer age] rose by two years over the course of 2013.

After all, radio and TV didn't replace print media.

Might so be, but judging from myself, my kids, most of my friends, and all my kids' friends, radio, TV, and print media are all dead. I guess we're living in the future.
posted by effbot at 4:20 PM on January 25, 2015

Did old media laugh and scoff at CNN like what CNN and Fox are doing to YT now?

Absolutely, but only after they were done laughing and scoffing at cable TV.

but I have a hard time buying into the better times narrative around old media

I understand that skepticism, and it's usually quite warranted, but it really was different with Murrow and then Cronkite. They were not beholden to ratings and profit, were not under pressure to sensationalize, and their reportage often demonstrated both integrity and independence. So people trusted them for demonstrated reasons, not just because they were more naive or only had three choices.
posted by LooseFilter at 4:23 PM on January 25, 2015 [6 favorites]

I understand that skepticism, and it's usually quite warranted, but it really was different with Murrow and then Cronkite.

As LBJ put it, "When I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country." I can't even imagine how that sentence could be shaped around any current news anchor. What would "I've lost Wolf Blitzer" even mean?
posted by Going To Maine at 4:36 PM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

Joy?
posted by feckless fecal fear mongering at 4:42 PM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

I should note that, since commenting, I've discovered that apparently that LBJ statement is apocryphal. Even so, I'd argue that the plausibility of the statement still speaks to Cronkite's perceived authority.
posted by Going To Maine at 4:49 PM on January 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

What would "I've lost Wolf Blitzer" even mean?

He finally found the plane!
posted by robocop is bleeding at 5:30 PM on January 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

We've lost Wolf Blitzer. He wandered out of the studio muttering something about crackers.

(Day 27 of CNN's continuing coverage of Where's Wolf?)
posted by dirigibleman at 7:57 PM on January 25, 2015 [5 favorites]

This would be a lot cuter if his administration wasn't putting actual journalists in prison.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 9:31 PM on January 25, 2015

This would be a lot cuter if his administration wasn't putting actual journalists in prison.

Which journalists? I mean, I'm aware that this has been a bad administration for press access, but I've clearly missed this particular news item.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:04 AM on January 26, 2015

Also, which part of this is "cute"? The fact that these folks are on Youtube? The casual nature of the interviews? Or old media's failure to understand that Youtube is consuming them while they fail to do anything about it?
posted by Going To Maine at 6:08 AM on January 26, 2015

Obama is smart. You're not. That's why he is the president and you are commenting on YouTube videos.
posted by gottabefunky at 11:21 AM on January 26, 2015

I just wanted to say that I love the Green brothers and their Crash Course series.
Then I was stunned to find that they did stuff outside of Crash Course, and I'm still reeling from their awesomeness.
posted by Theta States at 11:37 AM on January 26, 2015