Every year after the State of the Union speech, the president of the United States goes on a cross-country tour to make a case for his agenda.
In an effort to reach younger crowds, the president invited three well-known YouTubers to interview him face to face. Hank Green, GloZell Green and Bethany Mota all asked him a variety of questions, from the U.S. stance on North Korea to racial profiling to cyberbullying. As a millennial, I am glad the president reached out to people of my age group to talk about all the issues that matter.
Surprisingly, this string of interviews was heavily criticized by traditional media outlets. CNN took this opportunity to cover the story by first showing clips of GloZell in a bathtub full of milk eating cereal in an attempt to poke fun at her.
Even before the interviews were taped, CNN’s White House correspondent Jim Acosta asked White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest, “I’m just curious, was ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ or ‘David After Dentist’ not available?” Many news sites were shocked that these three internet personalities had been chosen to ask the president well-rounded and substantive questions.
It is very upsetting to see the news media, which has lost all kinds of legitimacy in recent years, discredit the legitimacy of Hank, GloZell and Bethany. These three personalities represent everyday Americans who are aware of American-based problems. Throughout the interviews you could tell that they spoke from the heart, unequivocally being themselves. If anything, they were brutally honest.
If you were to compare these to a traditional news media interview, MSNBC would play suck-up to the president, Fox would find a way to undermine Obama’s message and CNN would try to look for sound bites that would bring in ratings. Hank, Glozell and Bethany didn’t have an agenda or a mass media company to be accountable to. They were chosen because they cultivated an audience by being themselves. The real reason why they were sharply criticized is that people under 40 see the media as tools to hold up ideological biases instead of being an objective source that simply does “the news.”
There is so much distrust that the Daily Show with Jon Stewart is growing to be the most-trusted news program for the young generation. These days, millennials trust YouTube personalities because they’ve never been given a reason not to. These days young people get their news from the likes of Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, and everyday conversations are about sexism, racism, homo/transphobia, classism, climate change, unemployment and more.
These conversations don’t translate into the political arena or mainstream culture; that is why the White House decided to meet with YouTubers and start having conversations that matter.
The news media plays a special role in society. They are responsible for telling us what is in the public interest in the most objective way possible. Their responsibility is more than to their shareholders. Today, the media has moved so far away from that and we are all sick of it. All the news directors in the country have to realize that using hashtags and producing staged interviews to hold up ideologies is not attractive to young people.
Unfortunately, it is clear that high ratings will be the ultimate goal. Hopefully, Anderson Cooper, our resident silver fox dreamboat, can rescue the news from the grips of old, rich men.
Harold Joseph is a UF political science junior. His columns appear on Mondays.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 1/26/2015 under the headline “Millennials are not pleased with the outdated media"]
