Former President Barack Obama took a swipe at Fox News on Monday, claiming the outlet and its viewers “perceive a different reality” than other people.
“I’ve spoken about this before, but if you watch Fox News, you perceive a different reality than if you read the New York Times,” the former president said during an interview with the19th published on Monday.
Obama said the outlets indoctrinate their audiences, causing divisions between people.
“I think a lot of that has to do with changes in how people get information,” he continued. “And those differences have been amplified by social media, which allows people to live in bubbles with other people who think like them.”
Obama said these divisions are widening and that the United States is “more divided [now] than when I first ran for president in 2008.”
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“America has been fractured by a combination of political, cultural, ideological, and geographical divisions that seem to be deeper than just differences in policy,” he added.
The former president is hopeful, though, of President Joe Biden, who he said would bring people together.
“But if anyone can help bridge our divides, it’s Joe Biden,” he said. “He’s spent his life bringing people together. And as president, he’s been focused on beating back the pandemic and rebuilding our economy — ideas that Americans from both parties can support.”
Since leaving office, Obama has remained a vocal critic of Fox News, which regularly criticized his administration.
In a 2020 endorsement video for Biden, Obama seemed to discredit Fox News as “a propaganda network with little regard for the truth.”
“The other side has a massive war chest; the other side has a propaganda network with little regard for the truth,” he said in the video. “Pandemics have a way of cutting through a lot of noise and spin to remind us of what is real and what is important. This crisis has reminded us that government matters. It has reminded us that good government matters, that facts and science matter, that the rule of law matters, that having leaders who are informed and honest and seek to bring people together rather than drive them apart, those kind of leaders matter. In other words, elections matter.”
Obama similarly criticized the network in 2017 during his remarks at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi.
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“If I watch Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me,” he said. “I would watch it and say, ‘Who is that guy?’ This character Barack was portrayed in weird ways. It is all edited and shaped. … The point is, you get multiple realities.”
The comments came in response to then-President Donald Trump calling Fox News “much more important than CNN.”
