Dear Media: Just because something is substantive doesn’t mean it is not interesting.
Dear media: "Just because something is substantive doesn’t mean it is not interesting." Pete Souza / White House

President Obama, speaking at a journalism award ceremony last night, blamed the media for allowing candidates in the 2016 presidential race to become "entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis."

He continued:

I know I'm not the only one who may be more than a little dismayed about what's happening on the campaign trail right now. The divisive and often vulgar rhetoric that's aimed at everybody, but often is focused on the vulnerable or women or minorities; the sometimes well-intentioned, but I think misguided, attempts to shut down that speech; the violent reaction that we see, as well as the deafening silence from too many of our leaders and the coarsening of the debate; the sense that facts don't matter, that they're not relevant, that what matters is how much attention you can generate; the sense that this is a game as opposed to the most precious gift our founders gave us, this collective enterprise of self-government.

It's worth reading or listening to his critique in full, and he's right about the "billions of dollars in free media" that have been given to Donald Trump without requiring "serious accountability" of him.

But if President Obama doesn't like how our national media discourse has become "untethered to facts and reason and analysis," he should also be talking to the people in Silicon Valley (and Seattle) who create and control our social media platforms. That's because the change in media tone that Obama's lamenting is in large part a response to the central role that social media now plays in elections—and in all news dissemination in general.

A media organization without a strong social media game becomes less and less relevant. And social media, as it's currently structured and used, privileges hot opinion and intense emotion over cold facts and analytical reasoning. It's a place where influence is strongly linked to "how much attention you can generate," and less strongly linked to the quality of the information you're sharing.

I don't know what the answer is, but if the president wants facts and reason to take a more central role in our national discourse, he should be giving this kind of speech not just to journalists and media executives but also to the people who now control the increasingly central medium through which journalism spreads: the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jack Dorseys of America.