By Josh Gerstein
The White House’s drive to embrace new media and technology will achieve nirvana next week as President Barack Obama participates in what his aides are proudly billing as the “first completely-virtual interview from the White House.”
Yes, that’s right. We journalists are now entirely superfluous and irrelevant. The White House can solicit questions directly from the public and no third-party involvement is required. Max Headroom would be proud.
Rest assured, the online chat about Obama’s State of the Union speech won’t be completely unmoderated. Someone or something will have to select the questions to be asked and those to be skipped over. As past experience has demonstrated, allowing pure people power to dictate that will result in a raft of questions about marijuana legalization. So someone will be filtering, but it won’t be a member of the dreaded mainstream media or even the advocacy press.
Credit a few White House press corps veterans, like ABC’s Ann Compton, for spotting the disintermediation trend early on.
Perhaps we can find jobs in the coming renaissance of American manufacturing.
{Politico/Matzav.com Newscenter}
Interesting… PM Netanyahu did this over a year ago with the BBC. He answered questions from all over the globe.
Not obsolete – just uncontrollable.