
Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President - fizl
https://medium.com/@hankgreen/holy-shit-i-interviewed-the-president-fa3e8fb44d16?
======
austenallred
What I see in journalism today is a classic shift from leadership to
management. From substance to imitation. There are a lot of things that were
meaningful once upon a time that now are mostly ridiculous imitations. For
example, wearing an expensive suit, or a fancy watch, or having a big desk.
Those used to be symbols of strength and power - now most people my age see
that as nothing but douchebage-ness. The same goes for a lot of what's
happening in news. All the holograms and "exclusive" and that other nonsense
that is so terribly fake you can't help but cringe when watching cable news.

There was a time when flashing "BREAKING" in big bold letters and exclusive
interviews indicated the most important things happening in the news. Now it
means _nothing_. CNN was flashing "BREAKING" on the screens two weeks after
the Malaysian airliner went down, preceding a discussion about whether or not
it could have been a black hole that consumed it (that literally happened).
Conversations between two parties are so canned that correspondents are even
using the exact same wording as passed down by the party lines. Cable news is
nothing but theater now, and to people who haven't grown up watching the news
it seems very weird an disengenuous.

Focusing on externalities such as why someone became famous (a bathtub full of
cereal?) lets the old guard not care about up-and-coming forms of journalism,
dismissing its legitimacy. The legitimacy doesn't come from the content, but
in how serious and domineering one can look when delivering the news. It's BS
professionalism.

~~~
rohit89
> whether or not it could have been a black hole that consumed it (that
> literally happened)

Lolwut?! They seriously discussed the possibility of a black hole opening up
and swallowing the plane?

AFAIK CNN International did not have any such discussion though they did keep
going on and on about the plane.

~~~
austenallred
[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpVd7k1Uw6A)

~~~
dsuth
"Even a small black hole would suck in our entire universe".

Jesus fucking christ.

------
annon
"Millenials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-
terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be
surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with
each other or talking about issues that matter to them from perspectives they
can identify with."

I'm really tired of reading stuff like this, the idea that the president
doesn't use snapchat to communicate with voters and that is why millennials
don't care. Communication is not the problem. I have no problem picking up the
white house message, be it through the NYT, CNN, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter,
RedditAMA, Funny Or Die, The Daily Show, or anywhere else he has shown up the
past couple years. The issue is that it increasingly feels like there is
nothing that can be done to influence the situation. That's not just from a
personal perspective - it feels like the president has a really hard time
getting things done as well.

~~~
sanderjd
Absolutely true. Ok, everybody has decided to care; now what?

I do think a big part of the problem is that the answer to "what should we do"
has been pushed way too far up the chain. "Caring" is measured by voting
patterns in presidential and congressional elections. But that's way too far
up the chain, it's already too late to have an impact at that level. Impact
comes from affecting the processes that control who becomes politically
influential, which controls who is nominated in those elections. This is where
local and state governments and other politically active institutions
(including businesses) come into play, but it's not at all clear and very hard
to predict in exactly which ways. Voting in elections and arguing with your
parents is not even close to enough, but going further isn't an obvious path,
and nobody ever talks about how to do it. From a personal standpoint, I'm
interested in this stuff, and I vote, but I also recognize that I have no
influence and no idea what to do about it, which isn't exactly motivating!

~~~
caoilte
Syriza (Greek election today) is an example of what can happen next but things
have to be so very far gone before such a party can bubble to the surface. I
think you're one more crisis away from it in America - and there's a very real
risk that your leaders will divert attention towards blaming all of the
problems on a minority group.

Find a pivot with a really long lever and jump on the end of it. The War on
Terror is in full swing but we can defeat the war on drugs. You could get
people to read this - or at least absorb the salient points,
[http://chasingthescream.com/](http://chasingthescream.com/).

~~~
njs12345
Greece having PR is a big reason why Syriza has been able to do so well
-[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Greece](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Greece)

------
qq66
This article shows the extent to which the President and his team are playing
chess to these Youtubers' tic-tac-toe. By granting interview time to a group
so clearly hungry to establish their legitimacy as "real" journalists, Obama
ensured that they'd be in doe-eyed admiration of the President and the fact
that they are interviewing him, and forget the principal reason that political
journalism exists: to hold decisionmakers accountable to the public.

A journalist who treats the President like any other interview subject and
asks tough questions, even if the President gives evasive answers, is serving
the public more than a group who thinks to themselves "Holy shit, I just
interviewed the President."

~~~
NH_2
I don’t agree that the YouTube personalities, despite being given access,
didn’t ask the President tough questions. During the interview with Obama,
Hank Green (the author) asked the President about several things:

    
    
      - the feasibility of the ideas he put forth in the SOTU
      - the revolving door between industry and government
      - his use and alleged overuse of drone strikes
      - the long-term foreign policy strategy on North Korea
      - the confusing marijuana policy in the US
    

I think these are all legitimate questions that the President should have to
answer for. I think that there could have been follow-up questions asked, but
the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth. Obama
also took a long time in answering each question, which may have been because
the complexity of the issues discussed demanded long answers, or just because
he wanted to run the clock.

[Edit] First post, formatted bullets.

~~~
brandonmenc
> the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth

Precisely the problem with giving valuable interviewing time to people like
this.

They're so happy to show up that they "don't remember a lot of the interview,"
let alone press for it to be a real one. (Hank Green's words on MSNBC after
the interview.)

The President has stock answers for every single one of those questions, btw.

------
rewinds
I wonder how long until the cycle comes full circle, and Youtubers are co-
opted as subtle spinmakers for political ends. I wonder if it's already
happening or already happened.

I feel like that's actually a more terrifying prospect than the fact that the
younger generation doesn't watch TV news. You can mock, bash, and discredit TV
news with facts and "honesty", and that's exactly what happened. But if your
trusted source of news and political ideas is visceral comedy and memetic
entertainment trends, that's almost immune to rational debate, since anything
and everything can be dismissed as a joke.

I can imagine a future where politicians are elected on the basis of a lulzy
hashtag, and that scares me way more than what we have now.

~~~
maxerickson
#HopeandChange (By which I mean, social media and enthusiasm have already
played a strong role in a presidential election)

I think it's easy to co-opt these single channel people, you just pick the
ones you want to talk to.

Traditional media does this by trading softball treatment for access, if you
are granting access on an individual basis you can make sure you get the
treatment you want.

------
philwelch
Well, it's clear now that traditional journalism is dead and not coming back.
TV and newspapers are biased as hell and the idiots on YouTube are, well,
idiots.

But was it ever alive in the first place? Print journalism pretty much always
included the Buzzfeed-style linkbait garbage: just look at any cover of any
woman's magazine in the past 20 years. As for Rupert Murdoch, even though he's
never won a Pulitzer Prize, he's a perfect fit for the legacy of Joseph
Pulitzer and the politically-biased, sensationalist yellow journalism he made
his fame and fortune from.

One of the most terrifying facts about 20th century America is the idea that
three men--and the companies they were the face of--used to give all Americans
all of their information about the greater world around them. They could try
as hard as they could to be unbiased, but they would still have blind spots.
And that's putting it charitably.

The reality we have to deal with today is that there is a cacophony of morons,
partisan hacks, shills, and other unreliable narrators. But we have the
benefit that, unlike the Walter Kronkites of old, they actually look as
unreliable as they really are. Those of us who are interested in the truth can
triangulate between them (and revel in the wealth of raw source material--
smartphone videos turn every abusive police encounter into a potential Rodney
King incident) and find the fact of the matter somewhere within, and those of
us who are only interested in confirming their own biases can always find a
way to do that anyway.

------
marcusgarvey
Fantastic. One of the most opaque administrations in history [1] can buy
authenticity off-the-shelf, like a jar dime-store pomade, all because they've
co-opted some YouTube stars into their fiction. He's right, the traditional
media blew it when they, too, allowed themselves to be co-opted. But what we
need is an adversarial press, not people starstruck by their own access. It's
just as bad, if not worse.

[1]
[http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/3/27/barack_obama_the_...](http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/3/27/barack_obama_the_least_transparent_president)

~~~
comex
Did you watch the interview? There were multiple hardball questions, including
one with a critical premise regarding drone strikes and another about
regulatory capture (which the president didn't give a real answer to, but oh
well). No Snowden though. I also found the rest pretty interesting/informative
due to the breadth of topics covered, although of course he's said it all a
million times before.

~~~
marcusgarvey
I appreciate that some hardball questions were ultimately asked, but did you
notice the part in this blog post where he mentioned that his own first
instinct was to ask softer questions and it was actually the people from
Google who pushed him to ask harder ones? A good journalist would need no such
prodding.

------
mwagstaff
As a Brit, I feel that the BBC is considered pretty legitimate as a respected
news source, despite being old and decidedly non-hip. They normally seem to
report impartial facts, which works for me (but seemingly not the likes of
Fox/MSNBC).

We also have shows similar to the Daily Show (e.g. Have I got news for you)
which come along and take the mickey out of the news as well, just to be on
the safe side.

~~~
stegosaurus
Within the subject matter they decide to report they are not terrible, but
there are huge gaps in what they decide is worth reporting on.

As far as I'm concerned, their role is not simply to repeat endless interviews
with the major political parties. They have a role to play in showing the
public that other options exist. Lately they've given UKIP a ton of airtime
with endless nonsense scandals like 'X says Y down the pub' and almost ignored
the rise of the Greens.

Their wall to wall coverage during the 'phone hacking scandal' compared to
ongoing total-surveillance by the NSA getting a token mention every now and
then.

Today, they chose to describe Syriza as a 'radical left-wing party'. I don't
think that choosing 'radical' in this context is an accident.

I could go on; some of my bugbears are more trivial than others; but I think
they're definitely a 'mouthpiece of the establishment'.

Better than FOX? Sure; but that's not a high bar to meet.

Our electoral system is bad enough without major media outlets focusing almost
all of their time on Red vs Blue.

~~~
thom
Syriza is literally an acronym for 'Coalition of the Radical Left'.

------
Zaheer
I was pretty impressed by the article and just watched the youtube interview
and came out less impressed than before I read the article. The questions were
too soft - even CNN and other big news outlets ask tougher questions than
these guys did. I understand they have to be themselves but if this is
supposed to be the next outlet for news, it doesn't make me very hopeful.

~~~
michaelt
For those who haven't seen the video:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR6iQ62v9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR6iQ62v9k)

To me the questions the interviewers planned up front seem reasonably solid -
what's missing is anything after Obama's responses. The interviewers don't ask
follow-up questions, ask about things the answer omitted, or challenge
anything that was in the answer - they just move on to the next question.

Of course it would be a mistake for us to fetishize combative interviews or to
say the interviewer must always disagree with the politician regardless of
what they say. But if this type of interview is the future of journalism, the
interviewers need to get better at asking probing questions on the fly, not
just scripted questions they've had months to come up with.

~~~
dllthomas
_" the interviewers need to get better at asking probing questions on the fly,
not just scripted questions they've had months to come up with."_

... or the interviews need to last for years.

~~~
Karunamon
Seriously, the ability for the interviewers to say "Okay, now actually answer
the question I asked you" would be helpful. This is an absolutely infuriating
pattern - question is asked, answer is given that doesn't even _attempt_ to
address the question, interviewer moves on.

~~~
MrDom
I sympathize with both sides. It does frustrate me as well, but if the
interviewers did that, people would stop agreeing to do interviews with them.
It effectively prevents the interviewee from controlling the narrative, which
is the only reason to agree to an interview in the first place.

~~~
maxerickson
I don't sympathize with the media at all. If they all stopped trading softball
treatment for access, they wouldn't need to trade softball treatment for
access anymore. They raced to the bottom and we all lost.

~~~
MrDom
They didn't lose. On the contrary, they won.

------
tslug
There was so much reveling about the authenticity of modern bloggers that he
forgot to provide links to the actual interviews.

~~~
akerl_
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR6iQ62v9k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbR6iQ62v9k)

------
rayiner
I hate these sorts of "outreach to young people" PR events. They not only
reveal how totally out of touch and insincere politicians are with respect to
youth issues, but also how scatter-brained and incoherent young people are.
Seriously, trying to follow the thought process of this "article" while being
beaten in the face with rich media was physically painful.

~~~
pfraze
i dislike the PR event, but this article is not scatterbrained. it's casting
the negative reactions to their interviews as a battle for legitimacy in news
media, and it's focusing heavily on the generational shift. he makes some
pretty valid points about how younger people respond to mainstream news.
whether it's accurate that youtubers will become the new legitimacy is hard to
say, and the blogger has a obvious bias on that, but i found a lot of this
resonating with me

------
joshstrange
Here is a clip [0] from the press briefing when the “I’m just curious, was
‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ or ‘David After Dentist’ not available?” Quote
happened. The full video (queued to the same point as the first clip) can be
found here [1] (there are a couple other comments made not in the first clip).

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyTkZDDk-
hY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyTkZDDk-hY)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkNm0AKCVGI&list=PLRJNAhZxtq...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkNm0AKCVGI&list=PLRJNAhZxtqH8Awya4iITQ9-ffknKeVEnw#t=1068)

~~~
dpcan
You'd think "professional journalists" would understand the world they live in
a little better.

People need to be reached specifically where they spend their time consuming
information.

The world doesn't sit down at 5pm in front of their TV to see what happened in
the world today.

I'm a little surprised that room is only filled with "professional
journalists" on a day to day basis.

------
thaumaturgy
I'm reminded of a series by Greg Bear, "Darwin's Radio" and "Darwin's
Children", where the central premise is that there's a sudden and major
evolutionary change in newborn humans. One of the traits of the newly-evolved
humans is that they have a pervasive and tight-knit social structure. The
books try to describe what might happen as the young people grow up and
there's a power struggle between the "old" humanity and the "new" humanity.

Comments like rayiner's in this thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8943501))
are a perfect example. What he finds "scatterbrained" is something that works
just fine for a lot of young people. They've grown up in a media-rich, active
world, and they're making it their own. Their brains probably work a little
bit differently from older brains.

I think the article was really well-written and made a cogent argument. I
think that the facts of political engagement from youth support its argument.
Whether and to what extent old politics is able to co-opt young media remains
to be seen -- Obama's campaign certainly did it pretty successfully only to
further disenchant a lot of young people with the political process.

But eventually their generation will become the dominant political force in
this country, and if old media continues to approach politics the way it does
now, it's going to die when that happens.

------
eldavido
This article paints traditional media with too broad a brush. There's plenty
of junk on TV, but plenty in the blogosphere, too. And I really love my weekly
copy of the Economist, and doubt anything of its quality, depth, or rigor
could be published by someone without their budget or credibility.

So there's space for both larger "legacy" operations as well as smaller
independent writers and thinkers, publishing their thoughts.

The main thing is that access to distribution no longer guarantees
credibility: just because you're on TV, doesn't mean you have something
important/meaningful/honest/worthwhile to say. So it's up to each individual
to assess the credibility of their sources; ironically, a major "critical
thinking" skill taught in traditional university education, something
distinctly out of favor here on HN.

~~~
icebraining
_So it 's up to each individual to assess the credibility of their sources;
ironically, a major "critical thinking" skill taught in traditional university
education, something distinctly out of favor here on HN._

It's only ironic if you believe those skills are effectively taught and
learned in those classes. Do you?

------
wallflower
I remember reading a blog post a long time ago by someone talking about his
former college acquaintance. This guy would play video games at all hours and
dabble in comedy, trying different schticks out. He was quite eccentric, yet
shy. To give away the ending, his former college acquaintance is now Internet
famous to the degree that he makes a healthy living out of being a more
enlarged, extreme version of himself - 'The Angry Video Game Nerd'

Serious question. Who among here wouldn't want to be a known Youtube
personality with a million subscribers? I do fantasize about this from time to
time when watching .... (rspecs running).

~~~
geographomics
I don't know how widespread this opinion is, but I certainly wouldn't want to
be. If some work I'd created became immensely popular then that would be fine,
but putting myself out there to relentless, intrusive scrutiny sounds hellish.

------
ericthor
I think the article is shortsighted. I can't argue for the merits of cable
news, but there are many media organizations that have been increasingly shut
out by this administration.

All media organizations not just the cable news channels, but also the AP, New
York Times, and others are being shut out of many events which they formerly
had access to.

[http://www.onthemedia.org/story/frustration-white-house-
pres...](http://www.onthemedia.org/story/frustration-white-house-press-
corps-3/)

[http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/243894/aps-white-
house...](http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/243894/aps-white-house-staff-
press-losing-presidential-access-as-obama-officials-close-doors/)

Instead the clear strategy of administration has been to limit media access
and to control the narrative by launching material through there own channels.
Channels such as there youtube channel "The White House" where you can find
the interview Hank Green is referencing. I haven't watched the entire
interview, but if it is being hosted and potentially produced by the White
House I can't consider it objective. I don't think I can consider it
journalism either, but at the same time I don't think I can consider a lot of
what is on Fox News as journalism either.

There are a lot of other people who I like to see interview the President, but
never will. One person that comes to mind would be Amy Goodman. She isn't as
hip as the Youtubers, but she has spoken at my college and many others. She
definitely holds a clear leftists standpoint, but I know her questions would
be unrelenting and would lead to a much needed discourse about actions of this
administration.

There was this one instance were Bill Clinton accidentally ended up being
interview by her.

[http://youtu.be/FWx1bX4hWtM](http://youtu.be/FWx1bX4hWtM)

Anecdotally I watched the State of Union last week. Not on CNN or MSNBC, but
on Whitehouse.gov. Not positive, but it looked like is was using Youtube
livestreaming services. In that stream alongside each of the points there
preprepared supporting graphics.

------
caoilte
It's indicative that the entire article didn't wrestle with any real issues.

I don't think being a youtube star is any sure sign that they represent
Millenials. All indications seem to suggest that w/regard to news, Vice does a
better job of that (for what it's worth) - and Vice were as dismissive as
every other outlet.

------
santacluster
The reason why they don't care about whatever you think about the state of
journalism is because it allows them to play you directly like a cheap fiddle,
without the risk of any pesky journalists getting in the way.

QED.

The state of journalism may suck, but this airheaded attitude suggests it's
merely trying to follow it's intended audience and failing.

People this shallow are not going to be reached with quality journalism, so
please stop blaming others for your own shallowness and disinterest.

The "political process" isn't the media or the current crop of political
parties, it's _you_. You switch off, it's 100% _your_ problem.

Don't blame others for your own contribution to turning it into shallow
entertainment.

------
jrochkind1
So what did they youtubers actually ASK the president? Were they good
questions? That's really all I care about.

(Woah, it seems like really no)

------
guelo
Google will eventually screw Youtube up as they try to extract more money out
of it, guaranteed. Young people don't know this but CNN had a good 15 year run
where they were the young upstart and "authentic" and trusted. It always
happens, no matter the idealism and vision, eventually the relentless Wall
Street pressure for more profits wins out.

~~~
Retra
Well I'm sure President Obama will like to hear about this before his 2030
campaign when YouTube becomes the laughingstock of professional journalism.

------
gyardley
No matter what your thoughts on Middle Eastern politics, Rupert Murdoch is
actually right this time - it's cringeworthy to think the president of the
United States passed up a face-to-face meeting with the prime minister of
Israel in favor of this. Whatever political party the next one's from, it'd be
nice if they actually did their job.

------
seivan
5000 Yezidis kidnapped to be sold as sex-slaves to imperialistic muslim arabs
and somalis.

Not meeting the kurds fighting ISIS on all fronts

Israel threatened by both Hezbollah and their master Iran.

Not meeting Benjamin Netanyahu

But lets get interviewed by some asshole who filled a hottub with cereals to
eat.

------
pXMzR2A
Yea, I ain't reading an interview done with a political leader by someone who
is starstruck.

How will someone like that ask questions that a proper, professional, well-
prepared investigative journalist would ask? Bah.

------
droopybuns
This reads like @ProfJeffJarvis wrote it

------
icantthinkofone
Too bad they couldn't get someone who can write a more interesting headline
without vulgarities.

------
stefantalpalaru
So which one of these young whippersnappers asked about the kill lists? The
crackdown on whistleblowers? The increasing number of civilian casualties in
the Forever War? A foreign policy that leads to support of countries like
Saudi Arabia? The incarceration rate? Militarization of police? The quest for
total surveillance?

~~~
adwf
I only watched the first guy - the article author - and yes he asked about the
drone program and the drug war, specifically how it targets and incarcerates
minorities. I think he got the usual politically safe non-answers back, but
don't try and claim they didn't ask.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
> don't try and claim they didn't ask

"Are you at all worried that your administration is going to be seen as a time
when drone strikes were a technology like... we see as over- or misused?" is
not a question about kill lists, civilian casualties disguised in statistics
as "military-age males", double tapping to also kill the people coming to
rescue the first strike's victims or any serious issue related to UAV warfare.

Technology overuse and misuse is not the issue here. Killing people abroad is
the issue.

