Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President

Re:Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President by qq66 on Sunday January 25, 2015 @03:16PM (#8944085)

This article shows the extent to which the President and his team are playing chess to these Youtubers' tic-tac-toe. By granting interview time to a group so clearly hungry to establish their legitimacy as "real" journalists, Obama ensured that they'd be in doe-eyed admiration of the President and the fact that they are interviewing him, and forget the principal reason that political journalism exists: to hold decisionmakers accountable to the public.

A journalist who treats the President like any other interview subject and asks tough questions, even if the President gives evasive answers, is serving the public more than a group who thinks to themselves "Holy shit, I just interviewed the President."

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Re:Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President by jwmerrill on Sunday January 25, 2015 @03:30PM (#8944130)

> the principal reason that political journalism exists: to hold decisionmakers accountable to the public

Green's point in this article is that traditional political journalism has made a mockery of this responsibility, and I for one agree with him.

We can't have Walter Cronkite anymore because political media has completely debauched itself. I'd rather have earnest if naive amateurs than however you want to describe what happens on Fox News and MSNBC. Maybe not exclusively, but at least as a counterbalance.

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Re:Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President by NH_2 on Sunday January 25, 2015 @04:25PM (#8944320)

I don’t agree that the YouTube personalities, despite being given access, didn’t ask the President tough questions. During the interview with Obama, Hank Green (the author) asked the President about several things:

  - the feasibility of the ideas he put forth in the SOTU
  - the revolving door between industry and government
  - his use and alleged overuse of drone strikes
  - the long-term foreign policy strategy on North Korea
  - the confusing marijuana policy in the US

I think these are all legitimate questions that the President should have to answer for. I think that there could have been follow-up questions asked, but the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth. Obama also took a long time in answering each question, which may have been because the complexity of the issues discussed demanded long answers, or just because he wanted to run the clock.

[Edit] First post, formatted bullets.

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Re:Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President by brandonmenc on Sunday January 25, 2015 @08:55PM (#8945190)

> the session didn’t seem like it was intended to be a back and forth

Precisely the problem with giving valuable interviewing time to people like this.

They're so happy to show up that they "don't remember a lot of the interview," let alone press for it to be a real one. (Hank Green's words on MSNBC after the interview.)

The President has stock answers for every single one of those questions, btw.

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Re:Holy Shit, I Interviewed the President by comex on Sunday January 25, 2015 @03:25PM (#8944113)

> After I sent Google my first list of questions, they got back to me pushing me to drop the soft balls.

And indeed there were a few tough questions by the first guy. It wasn't exactly a bloodbath of hostility, but is that really necessary..?

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