Matt Wuerker Obama, the cable critic in chief

For someone who says he doesn’t watch much cable news, President Barack Obama sounded pretty familiar with the standard talk show format of left vs. right when he was asked about it earlier this year.

“It feels like WWF wrestling,” Obama explained to NBC’s Brian Williams in an interview. “You know, everybody’s got their role to play.”


The off-the-cuff characterization was in keeping with his newly emerging role, squeezed in between East Room ceremonies and pushing for health care reform: the commander in chief is becoming the nation’s media critic in chief.

Obama isn’t just donning his Columbia Journalism Review hat to diagnose what ails the wheezing industry. He’s attempting to isolate one particular media irritant — cable news.

This president, it seems, has an obsession with it.

The big three cable networks — Fox, MSNBC and CNN — have become a collective punching bag for Obama, usually referred to generically and always with derision.

“I know it can be easy, especially in Washington, to get caught up in the day-to-day chatter of cable television,” Obama said at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in March.

“I want to make sure everyone catches this, because I think sometimes the chatter on the cable stations hasn’t been clear about this,” he said that month about his efforts to reduce government spending.

“TV loves a ruckus,” Obama lamented at a town hall in Montana in August.

His frequent displays of cable contempt can be traced back to the very first moments of challenge in his administration, when the stimulus package started to get beat up and the White House realized it wasn’t going to win much Republican support for the initial priority of the Obama presidency.

It was then, as the president addressed a House Democratic retreat in Williamsburg, Va., that Obama bemoaned the “cable chatter” he thought was distorting the stimulus.

Since then, the phrase has become a frequent shorthand used by Obama to complain about coverage he finds simplistic, process-obsessed and generally geared more toward creating heat than light.

Not surprisingly, he employs the term most often when he’s frustrated that attention is being devoted to what he considers distractions to his agenda: The Henry Gates police incident, rowdy town halls, South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson’s outburst — all made-for-cable moments that Obama has come to dismiss as unworthy diversions.

“There’s always been frustration among presidents about what’s happening in the media,” said Frank Sesno, a former CNN Washington bureau chief turned George Washington University professor who said he still owns his “Annoy the Media — Reelect Bush” hat from the 1992 presidential race. “But cable has taken on this new tone — it’s particularly personal, and it’s particularly endless. So there’s some validity to what he says.”

Yet Sesno noted that it’s also cable that is more likely to air Obama’s town halls or Rose Garden remarks — events that are sometimes overlooked by the traditional networks or major papers.

“I doubt that he wants to unplug all the cable coverage because he’d vastly diminish his own podium,” the former newsman observed.

Administration aides say Obama does occasionally get glimpses of cable news from the many White House TVs that are always on and tuned in or when he’s flying on Air Force One.

But usually, aides say, the president is told by staff what controversy, speculation or outrage is being chewed upon that day on cable.

Obama’s private response matches his public disdain.

“It’s a lot of eye-rolling,” said one West Wing aide when asked how the president usually responds to the hot topic du jour.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the president’s goal is not to bash cable but to keep supporters and those who might be swayed focused on long-range goals, rather than bogged down with less consequential issues or fleeting narratives.

“I think a lot of this stems from the election,” said Gibbs, who served as a top campaign official and frequent traveling companion with the then-candidate. “You had primarily donors but others, too, who would get fixated by cable and get freaked out and start calling.”

Spooked by the latest poll showing Obama down, such individuals would buttonhole Obama and senior staff at all manner of events.

“We’d have to explain, ‘Look, we’re doing this differently,’” Gibbs recalled.

Now, it often falls on Gibbs to duck into the Oval Office to tell the president what “the cables,” as White House aides often call the channels, are focused on.

The press secretary said that Obama’s frustration is that they tend to focus on the extremes or try to make complex issues into either-or propositions.

“They want to boil something like Afghanistan down to more troops or no more troops,” he said. “Or make health care public option or no public option.”

Obama’s view is that most people approach issues in a far more nuanced fashion, Gibbs explained.

But the president, another aide suggests, is genuinely frustrated about how he thinks the cable coverage is giving short shrift to substance.

“Sometimes the stuff he’s trying to talk about gets bogged down in other, tangential meaningless [stuff],” said the aide, adding: “If you look at any of the polls, one thing that they all say is that people don’t have enough information about what he wants on health care.”

Gibbs said cable news outlets hadn’t complained about their whipping-boy status, quipping: “They probably think it’s pretty good advertising.”

Perhaps so.

Asked for comment, Fox News and MSNBC declined to respond.

A CNN executive surmised that Obama was talking about the other two networks.

“I get the sense, when you listen to what he’s actually saying, that he’s talking mostly about the ideological-leaning networks rather than CNN,” said the executive. “He’s talking about the back and forth and sometimes one-sidedness that you might get on other cable channels.”

Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s deputy communications director and a student of the modern media, said the cable channels ought not to think the president is picking on them but noted they were part of a more malignant virus coursing through the body politic.

“When he refers to cable chatter, it’s a broader statement about the political media culture today, which is driven by cable but not limited to cable,” Pfeiffer said. “The president ran on a mantle to change politics. And there are a whole host of elements that make it hard to change politics in the country. Those include special interest money, rank partisanship and a political media culture that celebrates all those things.”

Channeling Obama’s recent observation that cable rewards incivility — providing the rude with their 15 minutes of fame — Pfeiffer likened the medium’s impact on politics to what ESPN did to sports.

“In the way that some people say SportsCenter has encouraged showboating in sports at times at the expense of solid, fundamental play, cable news encourages strident partisanship and vitriol,” he observed.

And like Gibbs, Pfeiffer indicated that Obama’s frustration with cable dates back to a campaign where the then-senator’s tactics were often questioned by the pundits and commentators who frequently appear on the air.

“In the cable media culture, every day is Election Day,” Pfeiffer said. “You’re judged if you won or you lost the day.”

So while Republican presidents have carped about how liberal they perceive the media to be, Obama’s gripe is less about slant than about presentation.

The professorial president seems to wish people got their information from high-fiber, low-volume outlets.

“He may prefer to have an elite, thoughtful and even ponderous media culture that he thinks may have existed in some quarters in earlier times,” said Sesno. “But we’ve always had a raucous press at some level. So I don’t think that’s realistic.”

-- Kendra Marr contributed to this report.