President Obama’s seemingly low opinion of the press is shared by certain top White House officials, including Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes.
The president scolded media this month for how it has covered the 2016 presidential election, and encouraged reporters not to “dumb down the news.”
The month before that, he blamed the media for the rise of GOP nominee Donald Trump.
In December 2015, Obama accused the press of overdramatizing the rise of the Islamic State in order to boost their ratings.
Earlier than that, in July 2015, the commander in chief said some media gets on his nerves more than others, and chastised newsrooms for letting “shiny objects” distract from the real issues.
And few months before that, during an address at Georgetown University, Obama said “we’re going to have to change how the media reports” on things like poverty and the economy.
Unlike the president, however, Rhodes does a lot more than merely scold reporters for being bad at their job.
He uses his considerable power and influence to shop carefully constructed talking points to reporters who are either gullible or lazy, and plays the more inexperienced members of the press for chumps, according to a New York Times magazine report.
“It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the ‘content’ they provide to their readers,” the author of the Rhodes profile, David Samuels, noted.
“You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed,” he added.
This is where Rhodes, in a moment of brutal honesty, explained exactly what he thinks of the press.
“All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” the Obama official told Samuels. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Of course, as noted in the profile, Rhodes himself came to his position at the White House with zero foreign policy experience.
Samuels’ profile continued, detailing how Rhodes and his team sell the White House’s preferred narratives by using an easily manipulated media:
In this environment, Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them. ”
“I can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging.
Price laughed. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative that this is a sign of American weakness,’ ” he continued, “but — ”
“In fact it’s a sign of strength!” I said, chuckling.
“And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dotcom publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.”
Unlike the old days, Samuels continued, where reporters used to work hard to get the real details of White House going-ons, Rhodes and his team have nearly perfected the art of obscuring what’s true and what’s false.
The long, drawn-out fight over the Iran deal is a prime example of Rhodes’ tactic of using reporters to spin talking points into gold.
Rhodes admitted to Samuels that his team fed fiction to journalists and think tanks for the purpose of regurgitating them as truth.
“We created an echo chamber,” Rhodes said. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
“We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else,” he added. “So we knew the tactics that worked.”
This “echo chamber” got think tanks and journalists to “report” throughout the deal that the Obama administration negotiated furiously with Iran in 2014 and 2015, and that savvy players at the White House had gotten more out of the mullahs than they had originally anticipated.
It turns out, however, that the general terms of the Iran deal were settled on back in 2012.
In short, the White House has figured out a way to get easily manipulated reporters to repeat what they want them to say, and to turn narratives into “truth.”
“This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a ‘narrative’ over any serious period of time,” Samuels wrote.
“Now the most effectively weaponized 140 character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why,” he added.
