All the President's Explainers

By Jack Shafer

Monday, February 09, 2015

A sit-down interview with the president of the United States must be the most overrated get in all of journalism. Obviously, few journalists would spurn a chance to touch the hem of his garment if offered the chance. But beyond a brief burst of positive buzz for the news outlet, these sessions produce little in the way of news, as Vox’s Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias demonstrated anew Monday in their lengthy domestic and foreign policy Q&As with President Barack Obama.

Just tune your browser to Google News and see for yourself how little meat the hungry press corps was able to scrape from the bones of the Vox interview. CNN: “Obama ‘hopeful’ about partisanship, race relations”; Bloomberg: “Obama Says Wealth Accumulation Speaks to Need for Tax Shift”; National Journal: “In Vox Interview, Obama Sets Limits on What a President Can Accomplish”; Politico: “Barack Obama: Get rid of ‘routine use’ of legislative filibuster.” Klein and Yglesias haven’t gathered enough protein to make a decent news bouillon.

To be fair to Vox, even the most experienced White House reporters can be undone by the president in interviews. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News Channel, for one, has failed to puncture the White House shield in his “exclusive” Obama interviews. Presidents, after all, are playing on their home courts, where they set the rules and control the shot clock. A president is too well-briefed by his staff to be caught off guard by ingenious questions. No president will allow news to be made in an interview unless he wants to make news. Also, etiquette dictates that reporters not interrupt the president whenever he drones on like a slow leak out of a monster truck tire, which Obama does with Vox, at one point filibustering for 750 words—almost as long as this column!—in response to a shapeless labor question posed by Yglesias. An interview with the president may add to a journalist’s prestige, but, like White House briefings, it’s an empty ritual.

But that’s not what bothers me about the Vox interview. Here, for me, is the real rub:

In the example of Klein and Yglesias, they’re less interested in interviewing Obama than they are in explaining his policies. Again and again, they serve him softball—no, make that Nerf ball—questions and then insert infographics and footnotes that help advance White House positions. Vox has lavished such spectacular production values on the video version of the Obama interview—swirling graphics and illustrations, background music (background music!?), aggressive editing, multiple camera angles—that the clips end up looking and sounding like extended commercials for the Obama-in-2016 campaign. I’ve seen subtler Scientology recruitment films.

Explainer journalism, as practiced by Klein, purports to break down complex policy issues into laymen-friendly packages that are issued from the realm of pure reason. But as Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry succinctly put it last summer in The Week, “Vox is really partisan commentary in question-and-answer disguise” that “often looks more like a right-wing caricature of what a partisan media outlet dressed up as an explainer site would look like.”

As a sometime partisan commenter, I venerate partisan commentary because it can cut through the protective Styrofoam cladding politicians love to wrap their messages in. But if you’re going to be partisan about your journalism, if you’re going to give the president an easy ride, you’ve got to be clean about it! You can’t pretend, as Klein did when he founded Vox, that you’re taking a neutral approach to news and that all you’re doing is making the news “vegetables” more palatable by roasting them to “perfection with a drizzle of olive oil and hint of sea salt.” Klein and Yglesias are like two Roman curia cardinals who want us to believe their exclusive interview with the pope is on the level.

It’s a bad Obama interview, but not the worst. That honor goes to the interview New Republic owner (and onetime Obama campaign staffer) Chris Hughes and then-editor Franklin Foer conducted in 2013, serving Obama some of the most groveling and naive questions in White House annals. (See my friend Dan Kennedy's partial list of New Republic fawning questions, which include, “Can you tell us a little bit about how you’ve gone about intellectually preparing for your second term as president?” and “Have you looked back in history, particularly at the second terms of other presidents, for inspiration?”)

Are there no upsides to interviews with the president, even toadying or hagiographic ones? I suppose durable White House contacts can be made by landing one, but will these contacts be useful in chasing real news? Not likely.

Next up in Obama’s interview conga line is BuzzFeed News Editor in Chief Ben Smith, who will grill the president on Tuesday. Here’s hoping that Smith, an experienced newsman, makes news with his questions even if he doesn’t with Obama’s answers.