The conventional wisdom on why President Obama recently granted interviews to three YouTube personalities is that he wanted to reach a new audience. Daily Kos writer Egberto Willies endorsed a somewhat different explanation in a Sunday post: that Obama talked with the video bloggers because he’s fed up with the mainstream media’s bias against him and his policies.
According to Willies, the traditional media’s misdeeds include lending “plausibility to the lies that Obamacare had death panels and would be a government takeover of health care” and “refus[ing] to report all the research that showed that trickle-down economics is a failed economic model.”
“President Obama gave the traditional mainstream media carte blanche for six years. They failed to report truthfully, accurately, and in an unbiased manner,” alleged Willies, who added that “the president is effecting a paradigm shift. He is unshackling us all from a type of slavery to the traditional mainstream media. He is providing ‘average citizen-centric’ information dispersal, ensuring that the future of news is ultimately controlled by you.”
From Willies’ post (bolding added):
Who are these vloggers [video bloggers] that merited such distinction? These are vloggers with a combined reach of over 15 million YouTube viewers.
It wasn’t long before the attacks on the president began for bringing three vloggers into the White House…[Fox News’s] Howard Kurtz [said that] "it just seemed beneath the dignity of the office to be hanging out with some of these YouTubers"…
“The State of the Union is a serious policy speech," Kurtz said. "...If [Obama] was serious about getting some of the proposals in the speech—the tax hike on the rich, the spending program, free community college through Congress—he would be working the mainstream media. But he doesn’t think any of that is going to pass."
Kurtz must live in an alternate state of reality. How effective was the traditional mainstream media in being an unbiased arbiter to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) debate or the stimulus debate, or any other debate of consequence to everyday Americans?
Does [Kurtz] really believe that the traditional mainstream media is a conduit of truth? It is not. During the debate on Obamacare, the traditional mainstream media was an instrument used to drive its favorability numbers down. The traditional media gave plausibility to the lies that Obamacare had death panels and would be a government takeover of health care.
During subsequent debates for more middle-class centric policies, the traditional mainstream media was derelict in its duty to inform Americans about the decimation of European economies by austerity policies, policies are promoted by right-wing ideologues…Traditional media refused to report all the research that showed that trickle-down economics is a failed economic model.
President Obama gave the traditional mainstream media carte blanche for six years. They failed to report truthfully, accurately, and in an unbiased manner. The president decided to remove a level of indirection to get his message out. No longer will the traditional mainstream media get first dibs...
…The audience of these three vloggers is likely to be less engaged than most ideologues on all sides. The president is reaching out to that audience via that audience's trusted conduits. He is laying the foundation for his middle-class economics to be explored without the filter of a derelict traditional mainstream media.
Many wondered why the president took so long to visibly display his full-throated support for net neutrality. No one needs to wonder anymore…Using social media, vloggers, and bloggers to get his message out requires all have full unadulterated access to the internet.
Ultimately, the president is effecting a paradigm shift. He is unshackling us all from a type of slavery to the traditional mainstream media. He is providing "average citizen-centric" information dispersal, ensuring that the future of news is ultimately controlled by you. We must take this and show America that it works by doing our part. Get the news out through all of your channels. Make the corporately controlled traditional mainstream media irrelevant for being derelict to journalism and derelict to us all.
