President Obama Doesn’t Watch Cable News, He Reads Grantland
Grantland
In Politico Playbook today, highlights were provided of a conversation between White House Senior Advisor Dan Pfeiffer and Politico’s Mike Allen Wednesday at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. The conversation focused around various inane subjects. After all, when you get the chance to ask a senior White House staffer any question in the world, you need to ask about Bob Woodward. But while it was light on substance, it did reveal something important about President Obama’s reading habits—he almost certainly doesn’t bother with publications like Politico. Instead, he prefers a writer who runs a website that features long form stories about sports.
According to Pfeiffer, “his boss stopped watching a lot of cable TV shortly after he started running for president: ‘It will drive you insane if you’re president, sort of be caught up in the minute-to-minute chatter.’” But, the president somehow is able to govern the country without knowing “who won the morning.” Instead, he’s a big fan of ESPN’s Bill Simmons, the Editor-in-Chief of Grantland.com.
Grantland’s coverage of sports (the site also covers pop culture) doesn’t cover necessarily who won or lost. Its top sports piece today is a 6500 word profile of Don King. Although it features its share of short topical pieces, even those are thoughtful. A timely piece on the Utah Jazz features detailed analysis of the team’s defensive struggles. This is not to say that the site is perfect; like Obama, it can veer towards pretentiousness at times. But it does strike a startling contrast to cable news or of Politico. It’s not focused on the latest minor scooplet but on being thoughtful and original.
This seems to be the lesson of the interview—one missed by Allen in his interview. The leader of the free world ignores the daily churn of meaningless news that the cable news networks thrive on to focus on interesting long form pieces. And if the President doesn’t bother with it, why should anyone else?
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