Former President Barack Obama stated that since he departed the White House in January 2017, it was the polarized media that kept him awake at night, as The Daily Wire reported.
Obama spoke with "CBS Mornings" co-host Nate Burleson about the polarized nature of the media and how it reflects a polarized America.
“The thing that I’m most worried about is the degree to which we now have a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media, a splintered media,” Obama said.
The former president then referred to a time before cable news, the internet, and the 24-hour news cycle, when the majority of Americans received their news from three major networks and could at least concur on the facts of any given situation.
CBS's Nate Burleson: "Post-presidency, what...keeps you up at night?"
Barack Obama: "The thing...I'm most worried about is...a divided conversation in part b/c we have a divided media...When I was growing up, you had three TV stations...We almost occupy different realities." pic.twitter.com/KrNWHjSgap
— Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) May 16, 2023
“Today what I’m most concerned about is the fact that, because of the splintering of the media we almost occupy different realities, right?” Obama said. “If something happens that, you know, in the past everybody could say, ‘All right, we may disagree on how to solve it, but at least we all agree that, yeah, that’s an issue.’”
“Now people will say, ‘Well, that didn’t happen,’ or, ‘I don’t believe that,’ or, ‘I don’t care about the science,’ or, ‘I’m not concerned about these experts, you know, cause they’re just all liberals’ or, you know, ‘That’s just conservative propaganda,'” he added.
Obama then indicated that one of his objectives for the Obama Foundation was to explore methods to return the conversation to a point where people could at least agree on a common set of facts.
“How do we return to that common conversation? How can we have a common set of facts?” he asked.
During the same interview, the former president went into detail about his feelings on gun violence and mass massacres, making the argument that the gun control debate had become unnecessarily political.
“It has become sort of a proxy for arguments about our culture wars, you know? Urban versus rural. Race is always an element in these issues. Issues of … class, and … education and so forth,” he said.
“Instead of thinking about it in a very pragmatic way, we end up really arguing about identity, and emotion, and all kinds of stuff that does not have to do with keeping our children safe.”
