President Obama is not one to critique the media, according to White House spokesman Eric Schultz.
That’s what he said Tuesday when asked about the jarring, widely noticed split screen that cable news outlets employed as Obama remarked on the Ferguson, Mo., grand jury’s decision not to indict officer Darren Wilson for killing 18-year-old Michael Brown.
One side of the screen showed Obama calling on protesters to respond peacefully to the decision. The other side showed rioting and looting in Ferguson.
“I’m just wondering … if the president felt like the media handled things well last night?” a reporter asked Schultz.
“The president’s not a media critic,” Schultz replied.
But as the saying goes, everyone’s a critic.
And Obama certainly has critiqued the media in the past. He just doesn’t want to here, for some reason.
“Sometimes, if you’re watching TV or something, it’s just kind of a whole downer,” Obama said at a rally in September. “We’ve got struggles. We’ve got work to do. But there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about America.”
“The press and Washington, all it does is feed cynicism,” he said at a Democratic fundraiser one month earlier.
Three months before that, Obama said, “Sometimes — you wouldn’t know it if you were watching the news — but there are a lot of good reasons to be optimistic about America.”
The examples are nearly endless since Obama’s first term in office began in 2009. Most comprehensively, though, is an excerpt from Obama’s 2012 commencement address at Barnard College:
“No wonder that faith in our institutions has never been lower, particularly when good news doesn’t get the same kind of ratings as bad news anymore. Every day you receive a steady stream of sensationalism and scandal and stories with a message that suggest change isn’t possible.”
