Relying too heavily on social media can hurt the integrity of journalism, and therefore threaten a “well-informed electorate,” President Obama said Monday in a speech focused on excellence in political reporting.
Speaking in Washington, D.C., at a dinner event honoring Robin Toner, a New York Times reporter who died in 2008, Obama acknowledged that journalism has never been an easy profession, especially so in today’s newsrooms.
“Even as the appetite for information and data flowing through the Internet is voracious. We’ve seen newsrooms closed. The bottom line has shrunk. The news cycle has as well,” Obama said.
But he cautioned that with this “enormous pressure,” journalists look to “fill the void and feed the beast with instant commentary and Twitter rumors and celebrity gossip and softer stories.”
People who trust the media to ask questions for them or sort through the intricacies of policies that affect their lives depend on “deep reporting,” Obama said as he listed off such issues as problems in schools, water that has been poisoned and political candidates promoting policies that “don’t add up.”
This kind of journalism “matters more than ever,” Obama said, focusing his critique on political reporting today that has often come to rely on the easily digestible tweets and Facebook posts of politicians trying to voice their policies without coming face to face with the probing inquiries of a reporter.
He reasoned that while this sort of information is readily available to share in a report, it doesn’t have the lasting impact that investigative journalism can offer.
“And by the way lasts longer than some slapdash tweet that slips off our screens in the blink of an eye. That may get more hits today, but won’t stand up to the test of time,” he said.
“The era in which attention spans are short — it is going to be hard because your going to have to figure out ways to make it more entertaining,” Obama said. “You’re going to have to be more creative, not less. Because if you just do great reporting and nobody reads it that doesn’t do anybody any good either.”
“Ten, 20, 50 years from now, no one seeking to understand our age is going to be searching the tweets that got the most retweets, or the post that got the most likes,” Obama continued. “They’ll look for the kind of reporting, the smartest investigative journalism that told our story — lifted up the contradictions in our societies and asked the hard questions and forced people to see the truth even when it was uncomfortable.”
Despite his harsh rhetoric against over reliance on social media in journalism, Obama himself is no stranger to getting his word out using such platforms as Twitter and Facebook. Six years into his presidency, Obama started an official Twitter account in May of 2015, and he got a Facebook page in November of that year.
