Obama’s YouTube Interviewers Smeared By Fox News Host With Smaller Audience

On MediaBuzz, the Fox News program dedicated to reviewing the press, anchor Howard Kurtz took another opportunity to belittle President Obama and the YouTube personalities that interviewed him following the State of the Union Address. This is apparently a sore spot for conservative media dinosaurs like Kurtz who think that it is “beneath the dignity of the office to be hanging out with some of these YouTubers.” As noted in a previous article, the jealously and hypocrisy of the entrenched conventional media was exposed by their arrogant dismissal of a forward-thinking politician who recognizes the value in relating to a new generation of Americans on their own turf.

But Kurtz wasn’t finished. He took his criticisms to his own Sunday program to lay into the President and the YouTubers again. This time he focused on a distinction between the YouTube personalities and mainstream entertainment programs on television saying that he is “fine with Obama going on Ellen, The View, Colbert, but isn’t this sort of like the low-rent district?”

Howard Kurtz vs. YouTube

First of all, it wasn’t too long ago that going on shows like Ellen was looked down upon in the same way that Kurtz is demeaning YouTube. Bill Clinton’s appearance on Arsenio Hall was widely mocked by the dino-press. The same is true when politicians began to take cautious steps onto late night shows like Leno and Letterman. In most cases they still complain that such appearances trivialize the political guest.

Secondly, for Kurtz to insult the YouTubers as “low-rent” displays a giant, family-sized bag of chutzpah. His program on the journalistic wasteland of Fox News has an audience of about half a million viewers. Fox News Sunday, pulls in about 1.3 million. But the YouTube trio who sat with Obama last week reach a much bigger audience. Hank Green’s Vlogbrothers has a YouTube subscriber base of 2.4 million. The flamboyant Glozell draws 3.4 million. And Bethany Mota pulls in a whopping 8.1 million people. That’s about four times the viewers of Bill O’Reilly.

In Kurtz’s MediaBuzz segment he ran a brief video that featured only a few moments of fun or silliness, and he implied that they were representative of the whole of each interview. That is a deliberate and bald-faced lie. Many of the questions asked of the President were as substantive and probing as any that the more “professional” reporters would have asked. For instance…

  • Hank Green asked Obama whether the issues he raised in the State of the Union were politically feasible. He also asked whether Obama’s policy of drone strikes would be viewed in retrospect as a misuse of technology.
  • Glozell addressed the issue of police relations with African-Americans. She also imposed on Obama to justify his initiative to reinstate diplomatic relations with Cuba and the Castros.
  • Bethany Mota began with a question that many of her generation are struggling with, making education affordable. She continued with questions about the Nigerian terrorist group, Boko Haram, which has not been getting the media attention that ISIS does, even though they have been at times more lethal.

It would be difficult for Kurtz to honestly find fault with these lines of questioning without condemning his own colleagues who have asked many of the same types of questions. But instead he chose to air some laugh lines and pretend that’s all that occurred. And his panel was no better. Jonah Goldberg of the ultra-rightist National Review whined that Obama “only likes to talk to people who think he’s awesome.” That will come as some surprise to Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and Bret Baier, who have both interviewed Obama. Either Goldberg has early onset Alzheimer’s or he is purposefully misleading. As for examples of profound inquiries by Fox News reporters, this morning Chris Wallace asked Obama’s Chief of Staff if because of the election results in November “Doesn’t the President need to scale back his agenda to work with Republicans?”

Really? So the President should abandon his principles and capitulate to a party that won a majority in the lowest turnout election in 70 years? And when did Wallace ever ask Republicans to scale back their agenda in 2012 or 2008, after big Democratic victories? In fact, one of the first things Wallace said after the first inauguration of Obama was to question whether he was actually president because Chief Justice Roberts flubbed the oath of office. Then GOP senate leader Mitch McConnell declared that his top priority was to make Obama a one-term president. And Rush Limbaugh said “I hope he fails.” Apparently no agenda scaling back was necessary for the Republican losers.

Before Kurtz maligns others as being in a “low-rent district” he should assess the value of his own property. What he will find is a petty, biased, plot of fear mongering and racism. It’s a tract that Fox News has spent years developing.

Advertisement:

4 thoughts on “Obama’s YouTube Interviewers Smeared By Fox News Host With Smaller Audience

  1. But it’s not “beneath the dignity of the office” for Mr. Obama’s unelected predecessor to hang around with kindergartners so they can teach him how to read My Pet Goat, right, guys?

    Did anyone think it “beneath the dignity of the office” for FDR to appear on radio? You go where the technology leads you, imbeciles. But if you Rethuglicans don’t want to take advantage of the new opportunities, fine. We’ll be glad not to vote for you next year…

  2. It gets easier and easier to point out the lies, hypocrisy and hate that Mark keeps spewing. So here we go. First of all, the panel did acknowledge that these Youtube hosts came up with a good question every now and then, (Although you glossed over the way that Glozell asked President Obama about Cuba. She said that the Castro brothers “put the d### in dictator”. Admittedly that is true, but that’s a weird way of putting it.)

    But now, speaking of weird, you are ignoring the following. President Obama was interviewed by a woman who wallowed around in a bathtub full of Fruit Loops and milk (and then ate and drank Fruit Loops and milk). He was also interviewed by a guy who had previously posted a video talking about farts. A president that had any dignity at all would not travel down this road.

    As for ratings: Howard Kurtz’s show is on Sunday morning, and then gets repeated on Sunday afternoon. Nobody gets big ratings on Sunday unless they are wearing shoulder pads and chasing a pigskin.

    If you want to keep downplaying the fact that the Republicans won both houses of Congress, that’s to your detriment. Keep whistling past the graveyard. As for your burping forth about Fox News being racist – that has been a lie from the get-go and will continue to be so.

    • And once again, he addresses no point mentioned in the article. Why do you keep coming here, Scott?

      • yer all a bunch of assholes ,conservatives and liberals alike,look what your partisan bullshit has done to a once meaningful country. fuck y’all.

Comments are closed.