Sitting between two ferns, President Barack Obama spoke to actor Zach Galifianakis this week about the Affordable Care Act in an almost-last-ditch effort to get more young people to sign up for private health care plans by using the federal and state government-run marketplaces.
But I’d bet most people reading this column, which appears in a college newspaper, already knew that. That’s because Obama’s sales pitch, in some ways, worked.
As the White House would tell you, funnyordie.com, the website that hosts the semi-scripted show, was the No. 1 source of traffic yesterday to healthcare.gov, the federal marketplaces.
And even if you’re 18-34 and you didn’t sign up for health care after watching the “Between Two Ferns” piece online, the president made his pitch and you remembered it. And, judging by the “Funny or Die” meter on the Galifianakis episode, you likely laughed.
But some critics argue that a sitting president appearing on a Web-only, tit-for-tat comedy show — with a microphone pinned on to his lapel with masking tape — is not the best use of precious presidential time and resources.
As The Washington Post noted, with the advent of the Internet, Obama is the first president who is able to bypass traditional news media in favor of more laid-back, non-traditional media that will be kinder in its line of questioning.
For example, The Washington Post noted that Obama last met with the newspaper in 2009. Since then, Obama has given interviews to People, Entertainment Tonight and The View, as well as entertainers Jay Leno, Steve Harvey and Jon Stewart. NBA legend Charles Barkley interviewed the president this year. Now add Hangover star Zach Galifianakis to the bunch.
Obviously, the White House’s agenda can be better delivered unfiltered by lighter media outlets. So it’s a no-brainer, perhaps, that a president with more than 27 million Twitter followers — many more than The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other top news outlets with a beefed-up Washington Bureau — doesn’t feel like he needs to cozy up to the traditional news media.
Because they will ask tough questions and write stories that have deep context from seasoned reporters who know how Washington does and doesn’t work. That’s probably a scary thought for a president facing approval ratings near or touching his all-time lows, depending on the poll.
But Obama often talks about what this nation’s leaders can do versus what is the right thing to do. He said that about the NSA programs that have come under intense scrutiny.
“The power of new technologies means that there are fewer and fewer technical constraints on what we can do,” the president said in January during a landmark speech on U.S. intelligence gathering. “That places a special obligation on us to ask tough questions about what we should do.”
I wonder how he would feel about applying that logic to disseminating his agenda.
Now that traditional media — with reporters who will vet information and offer in-depth looks at a president’s public policy agenda — is becoming eclipsed by brand new forms of “light” media, should the president opt for the easy way or the hard way to inform the American people of his White House’s plans? Because we know he can opt — and is opting — for the easier way. But should he?
Regardless of what he thinks of that, my prediction is an obvious one: Obama’s not going to stop the light interviews — which history might be kind to — any time soon.
Joshua Jamerson is a junior studying journalism and local editor of The Post. What did you think of Obama’s “Between Two Ferns” interview? Talk about the episode with him at jj360410@ohiou.edu.
