"Obama, the coolest president ever!"
How Obama broke the Propaganda Model
Not liberal bias, not even Trump made journalism mutate into postjournalism. The true causes are media ecology (the internet) and business (the flip from plentiful ad revenue to desperately seeking subscriptions). And it started long before Trump. Read more in Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization.
According to Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988), bureaucratic news sourcing was one of the “filters” of the Propaganda Model. News media cannot have correspondents everywhere, so they had to rely on the bureaucratic networks of government and corporations. This way, bureaucracy and corporations bribed and tamed the news media at the same time: their exclusives had economic value but also disciplined journalists. Journalists were conditioned to receive treats from bureaucratic hands, and nobody bites the feeding hand.
This also led to the tightening of personal and professional relationships between journalists and ruling and corporate elites. “The mass media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest,” said Herman and Chomsky.
The internet ended that beautiful friendship. The emancipation of authorship allowed everyone to supply news to everyone and severely weakened bureaucracy’s role in news sourcing. The media could now bypass bureaucracy to receive information from anywhere, including leaks from within bureaucracy itself or war-zone reports from witnesses on the ground rather than from military channels.
The divorce between the media and bureaucracy as a news source had, however, a flip side for the media: the bureaucracy no longer needs the media as much as it once did. The internet has emancipated authorship for everyone, including those in power, who can now communicate with the public directly. They have all the technological means to be the media themselves.
And the first to do it was not Trump. It was Obama.
This tendency was first noted in the early 2010s, when the media pointed out that the White House had created its own “Obama’s media machine, state-run media 2.0.” As the 2012 re-election campaign approached, the White House began using all media formats, old and new. The media complained that the White House had replaced them with its own media capacity. As ABC News reported,
Over the past few months, as White House cameras have been granted free reign behind the scenes, officials have blocked broadcast news outlets from events traditionally open to coverage and limited opportunities to publicly question the president himself.
The practice continued after Obama’s re-election. Accustomed to being gatekeepers and watchdogs of democracy, journalists were unhappy with the White House becoming a more successful medium for covering the president. In 2013, CBS News wrote:
It’s all courtesy of the Obama image machine, serving up a stream of words, images and videos that invariably cast the president as commanding, compassionate and on the ball. In this world, Obama’s family is always photogenic, first dog Bo is always well-behaved and the vegetables in the South Lawn kitchen garden always seem succulent.
With direct access to a world-ranking celebrity like the US president, his own media machine produced high-quality, highly sought content that easily outcompeted other outlets covering him. Pictures, videos, jokes, and other media portraying the president through the adoring eyes of his staff reached the public instantly and gained rapid popularity.
“Barack Obama is the coolest president ever. Period,” declared The Indian Express in 2016, showcasing a gallery of official White House photographer Pete Souza’s remarkable images. Many were true chef-d’œuvres, among the best in the genre, capturing Obama with kids, staffers, politicians, family, and more. In these shots, he appeared the irreproachable “People’s President.” These masterpieces of Obama candidly interacting with people became a secret ingredient of his coolness, complementing his warm personality. No president before—let alone after—has had such a photo- and tele-genic portfolio.
The media rightly worried that such content was always controlled and curated, consistently showing the president from the desired angle. “You’ll have to look elsewhere for bloopers, bobbles, or contrary points of view,” noted a CBS News observer, adding that “flattering Obama images flourish as White House media access narrows.”
No censorship, filtering, or any of Herman and Chomsky’s Propaganda Model systemic distortions were needed to manufacture consent for Obama’s coolness. It was still a recognizable and, in Obama’s time, highly trusted bureaucratic primary source that supplied exclusive content and framed narratives—but not in the way Herman and Chomsky defined sourcing. The source still functioned, but not for the media. The filter still aimed at manufacturing consent, but not within the Propaganda Model of the media.
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As a first-class bureaucratic source, Barack Obama was also the first president to literally replace the media with bloggers in the news supply chain. In 2015, instead of giving a traditional post–State of the Union interview to journalists, Obama invited three YouTube stars to the White House: GloZell (3 million followers), Bethany Mota (8 million), and Hank Green of Vlogbrothers (2.4 million).
The media were confused and sounded slightly upset—even the liberal outlets. “YouTube star who drinks cereal from a bathtub to interview President Obama,” headlined ABC News, referring to GloZell, who had, indeed, posted a YouTube video of herself taking a cereal bath. “YouTube stars interview Obama and things get weird,” reported CNN. One of the YouTube stars, Hank Green, fired back: “Legacy media isn’t mocking us because we aren’t a legitimate source of information; they’re mocking us because they’re terrified.”
The Washington Times wrote,
Howard Kurtz, Fox News’ media critic, called the interview “beneath the dignity of the office” of the presidency, while other members of the press expressed unhappiness with Mr. Obama’s seeming dodge of the tough questions they could fire in favor of a softball sit-down, question-answer session.
Those were peaceful years in the relationship between the president and the media. Then came Donald Trump. He completely broke the Herman–Chomsky Propaganda Model. His media behavior—let alone his presidential and personal behavior—opened a new era in news sourcing…
Read more: Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarization.
See also books by Andrey Mir:
The Viral Inquisitor and other essays on postjournalism and media ecology (2024)
Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect (2024)
Really enjoyed this piece Andrew! The curation and control seem especially important in the both austere and intimate oval office. Contrasting the photo of Obama and the infant to the newly gold-encrusted room is telling of two types of very individualistic presentations of image.