Chatter on cable news merely panders to a self-selecting audience, he’s said many times over. Newspaper headlines, he claims, highlight only negative trends while ignoring diplomatic wins and economic gains made during his tenure.
Perhaps the greatest fault of legacy media, in the eyes of the White House, has been its aging audience: only 20% of Americans aged 18-24 say they read a daily newspaper, according to the Pew Research Center. The average viewer of network and cable news programs is aging into his sixties.
READ: Obama dishes on national security
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Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s longtime senior adviser who announced last week he’s stepping down, has consulted Silicon Valley executives “to develop recommendations for how we best communicate to audiences in the digital age,” a White House official said. He’s expected to complete the review before he leaves the West Wing next month.
“We’re on the cusp of a massively disruptive revolution,” Pfeiffer told CNN’s Brian Stelter on “Reliable Sources” late last year.
“It is a revolution in the distribution and consumption of information,” he said. “And there are big things that are going to happen. The old models are starting to fall. And how we adjust to them, and how everyone adjusts to them — you know, entertainment television, the movies, the news, politicians and the government trying to get their message out — is going to be a massively fascinating thing.”
