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Getty White House: President Obama 'has no plans to enter the media business'

On Friday, Mic editor in chief Jake Horowitz floated the possibility that President Barack Obama could enter the media business after his presidency. Horowitz, a former Change.org employee with close ties to Obamaworld, cited anonymous sources who said that Obama had an interest in media, which could take the form of launching a media company or creating a Netflix show.

White House communications director Jen Psaki denied that Obama was interested in entering the media business.

"While the president will remain actively engaged in inspiring young people and he is interested in the changing ways people consume information, he has no plans to get into the media business after he leaves office," she told Mic.

Horowitz is close to the Obama administration. In 2013, he worked with the White House to create a Mic project in support of the Affordable Care Act. In 2015, Horowitz interviewed Obama for Mic.

Obama has been critical of news coverage, suggesting that changes in the media landscape can cloud people's judgments. In a speech he gave at the University of Pittsburgh, Obama laid out his vision for what the new media world should be doing to rectify that issue.

"It used to be there were three television stations and Walter Cronkite is on there and not everybody agreed, and there were always outliers who thought that it was all propaganda, and we didn’t really land on the Moon, and Elvis is still alive, and so forth," Obama said at the conference, according to a transcript. "But, generally, that was in the papers that you bought at the supermarket right as you were checking out. And generally, people trusted a basic body of information...

"But there has to be, I think, some sort of way in which we can sort through information that passes some basic truthiness tests and those that we have to discard because they just don’t have any basis in anything that’s actually happening in the world," he added. "And that’s hard to do, but I think it’s going to be necessary, it’s going to be possible. I think the answer is obviously not censorship, but it’s creating places where people can say, this is reliable and I’m still able to argue about -- safely -- about facts and what we should do about it while still -- not just making stuff up."

