Obama: I’m Most Worried About ‘Divided Media,’ We Have Different Realities

Former President Barack Obama said Tuesday on “CBS Mornings” that the “divided media” was his biggest concern for the future of the United States.

Host Nate Burelson asked, “Post-presidency, what about this country keeps you up at night?”

Obama said, “The thing that I’m most worried about is the degree to which we’ve now had a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media.”

He continued, “When I was coming up, you had three TV stations. And people were getting a similar sense of what is true and what isn’t, what was real and what was not. Today, what I’m most concerned about is the fact that because of the splintering of the media, we almost occupy different realities.”

He added, “In the past everybody could say all right, we may disagree on how to solve it, but at least we all agree that that’s an issue. Now, people will say, well that didn’t happen or I don’t believe that. And one of the goals of the Obama Foundation and one of the goals of my post-presidency is, how do we return to that common conversation? How can we have a common set of facts. We may disagree on gun violence in terms of what the best prescriptions are, but we can’t deny the data that says the United States has levels of gun violence that are five, ten, fifteen times more than other countries.”

Obama concluded, “So if we say it’s just a mental health problem, it’s not like there aren’t people with mental health problems in those other countries. What’s the difference. This is probably the difference. Now we can have a debate, but at least we’ve agreed on some facts.”

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