Thus Spake Our Savvy Saviour:
“[P]art of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another – well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine, or this or that or the other,” Obama said. “The truth is this is a very complex set of problems and bad decisions can result in huge taxpayer expenditures and poor results.”
Raw Story quotes from the transcript of a New York Times interview, where:
Asked about his news consumption habits […] Obama said he “rarely reads blogs,” but reads newspapers – in their paper form – and weekly news magazines.
Hell, yeah, because we all know that they newspapers and weekly news magazines always provide in-depth coverage of the complex problems. Or make shit up. Or ignore the facts. Or further a political agenda thru selective coverage. Sometimes they get it right. Sometimes they fail. Just. Like. Blogs. Big difference: if a blogger starts screwing up, his readers can a) call bullshit on him, and b) correct him in real-time in-line. You can’t do that when Bill Kristol lies and Fred Hiatt covers his ass for him; you can’t do that when the New York Times lets David Broder rave on cluelessly for pages, or when an editor and publisher insists on relying on mooni-fied AP for supposedly hard news coverage and facts. If Obama only thinks the internet is a cool way for him to fundraise and send out his weekly gospel messages to the unwashed masses, then he needs to think again.
Oh, and as long as his solution to “a complex set of problems” involves Tim Geithner and his current posse of insider asshats from the big banks and Wall Street, then he’s clearly reading the wrong newspapers and magazines. Or, as Atrios (one of those stupid bloggers) puts it:
I know I’ll make this point a billion times before this is all over, but there’s a difference between thinking that well run financial intermediaries (which, in theory, competition will create) are necessary for a modern economy and believing that the semi-oligopolistic system of financial intermediaries which have demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt that they’re at best incompetent and most likely some combination of incompetent and incredibly corrupt should be maintained at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars (optimistically) in taxpayer money.
In others words, Obama: if you keep throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at Citi and the rest of Geithner’s buddies because you think that’s a cheap solution to a complex problem, then you really need to read some more blogs, pronto. They are the problem. Giving them more money will not make the problem go away. And, no, you will not read that in any of your fancy newspapers, because they (at least their current owners, who are largely comprised of investors, not, you know, news people) have a vested interest in maintaining a status quo that involves big, influential banks and important people in important places that they can impress with their ass-kissing and ditto-heading.
