Former President Barack Obama says he is wistful for a time before he entered the White House when Americans believed in the same set of facts.
Speaking at Rice University on Tuesday, Obama said Fox News viewers and New York Times readers are living in “entirely different” realities, because “the basis of each respective party have become more ideological.”
“Whether it was [Walter] Cronkite or [David] Brinkley or what have you, there was a common set of facts, a baseline around which both parties had to adapt and respond to,” Obama said, according to CNN.
“And by the time I take office, what you increasingly have is a media environment in which if you are a Fox News viewer, you have an entirely different reality than if you are a New York Times reader,” he continued.
Obama has previously said one of the biggest challenges to the country is Americans not sharing a common set of facts.
“At a certain point, you just live in a bubble. And that’s part of why our politics is so polarized right now. I think it is a solvable problem, but it’s one we have to spend a lot of time thinking about,” he told David Letterman in January.
