President Obama’s media strategy is apparently shifting to digital, as Vox.com published its two-part interview Monday.
Obama first spoke with editor-in-chief Ezra Klein about the decades long expansion of income inequality.
“Today what you have is quarterly earnings reports, you have compensation levels for CEOs that are tied directly to those quarterly earnings, you’ve got international capital that is demanding short term profits…” the president said, concluding that the old distribution model—decent wages, healthcare, defined pension plans—are being eliminated, hurting average Americans.
“Part of what’s changed is that a lot of that burden for making sure that the pie was broadly shared took place before government even got involved,” Obama said, suggesting in the past, strong labor unions and community-oriented CEOs helped shape a strong, equitable economy.
The president also took shots at the media, blaming it as the spark to a lot of our political polarization:
But a lot of it has to do with the fact that a) the balkanization of the media means that we just don’t have a common place where we get common facts and a common worldview the way we did 20, 30 years ago. And that just keeps on accelerating, you know. And I’m not the first to observe this, but you’ve got the Fox News/Rush Limbaugh folks and then you’ve got the MSNBC folks and the — I don’t know where Vox falls into that, but you guys are, I guess, for the brainiac-nerd types. But the point is that technology which brings the world to us also allows us to narrow our point of view. That’s contributed to it.
The Vox interview is different than Obama’s previous interviews with YouTube in January and Zach Galifianakis in 2014 in its produced nature: the interview featured music, graphics, and dim lighting at times to shape a more polished piece.
The president is set to sit down with BuzzFeed Tuesday for two interviews: one will be distributed across BuzzFeed’s various platforms, the other featured as part of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures.
Watch both Vox interviews below: