Remember the good ole days when people got famous for nothing but a sex tape? Well, now there are people who have become famous for eating Froot Loops while soaking in a bathtub of milk, or for creating a video called “14 Fart Facts For My Flatulent Friends.” These were exactly the kind of people the White House Administration sought in a recent interview with President Obama.
Hank Green, he of the “14 Fart Facts” fame, felt the need to come out and defend their selection as presidential interviewers. It’s because, as he stated, “We are ourselves.”
We’re all pretty different people with different audience demographics and styles of video-making. In fact, I want to shout out to Google for making sure a diverse group of people headed to the White House for this opportunity. They would have caught a lot less flak from the press if they’d used creators who fit into the established idea of what an “engaged American” looks like. Diversity was clearly a goal, but there is one thing we all have in common. We are ourselves...
We talk about our lives and share our thoughts honestly. Our audiences do not watch us just to be entertained or to get information. They watch us because they like us.
This is, of course, why the White House opened its doors to us. They want to connect with that diverse audience and they want that connection to be sympathetic. Since they’re getting an undeniable benefit out of engaging with us, we were asked to not go easy on the President.”
Interesting. As Ben Shapiro at Breitbart points out, The White House “…has never – ever – asked for tough questions.” The likelihood of Obama being asked “tough questions” by people made famous for acts of idiocy is (and was) highly unlikely. Bethany Mota (she of “do-it-yourself makeup tips” YouTube fame) asked Obama what he did in his spare time (btw, he watches Sports Center). That’s a hard question to think of all by yourself!
You have the President of the United States sitting in front of you and you can ask him anything, and you ask what he does in his spare time? That’s really deep. Actually, she could have followed up by saying “Was that what you were doing during the attacks on Benghazi?” But really, what else would you expect from a 19-year-old girl who admitted she isn’t very involved in politics?
However, Green couldn’t imagine the media elite would be offended. “It never occurred to me that the news media would react negatively to this. But the mockery began as soon as the interviews were announced. Jim Acosta, CNN’s senior White House correspondent, asked the press secretary, “I’m just curious, was ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ or ‘David After Dentist’ not available?”
Mr. Fart Facts thinks he’s not to be compared with these other silly acts. He defends the White House as only trying to help get younger people more involved in politics:
I may be biased here, but I feel like there’s an actual and honorable goal in all of this. America needs to convince young people that there are good reasons to be civically involved. Millennials are soon to be the biggest hunk of the electorate and, if the mid-terms are any indication, they simply don’t care. And that shouldn’t be surprising since no one is connecting to them in the ways they connect with each other or talking about issues that matter to them from perspectives they can identify with.
He then went on to talk about his commitment to asking “real, hard questions”:
Questions that break out of the news cycle and come wrapped in context beyond ‘gotcha’ moments and political spin. I asked questions that my audience wanted answers to and questions that I wanted answered, not questions that would best serve one or the other political party. But, I wasn’t going to walk away from a man who has gotten nothing but grief for a health care bill that has made my life immensely easier without saying, “Thanks.”
So objective!
Green finished by saying he wouldn’t have a problem a “pawn” for the president, since the media for people over 30 has no legitimacy any more:
The shift in media consumption from television and newspaper to Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter has left a generation without a source of information that they can trust. In my experience, people under the age of 30 tend to simply assume that all media are biased. They find ways to engage, but those conversations are isolated from the broader culture and certainly from politics. If their values are not incorporated into the future of this country, it will be a worse future.
He summed up: “If Google and the White House want to use me as a pawn to counteract this bullshit, sign me up.”
