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Obama Suggests Media Enable Trump

Journalism is "more than just handing someone a microphone."

While delivering a keynote address at a journalism awards ceremony Monday evening, President Obama scolded the media for enabling the deeply partisan atmosphere that’s engulfing politics. “It’s worth asking ourselves what each of us—as politicians, as journalists, but most of all as citizens—may have done” to create the situation at hand, he said. “Some may be more to blame than others for the current climate, but all of us are responsible for reversing it.” Though he did not directly name Donald Trump, the president chided political reporters for not doing “more than just handing someone a microphone”—alluding to the GOP frontrunner’s appetite for free media. The job of a reporter, Obama contended, is purely “to probe and to question and to dig deeper," before noting that financial pressures have changed the industry’s incentives when it comes to story selection and editorial decisions.