Forget The Salahis — Is Barack Obama The World’s Biggest Reality Star?

“Considering the White House’s hulking, media-rich Web site, its Facebook page, photo galleries and podcasts on iTunes, the presidency seems less threatened by the incursion of a reality show than running an administration that is in danger of becoming one.”

— David Carr, New York Times media columnist, describing the ” all-Obama, all-the-time” era “that concluded in a reality-program couple crashing a state dinner at the White House.”

David Carr’s latest New York Times column, “Reality TV’s Glare Hits High Office,” has more zingers than Obama has photo ops, as he suggests the president scale back on the “oversharing.”

Carr accuses the “Celebrity in Chief” of dumbing down the role of a leader, creating “the impression that the leader of the free world is part of a milieu that is more TMZ than C-SPAN.” His evidence is largely pop cultural: Big Brother, Oprah, Vogue, Facebook and, of course, the White House-crashing Salahi couple and the Real Housewives of D.C. “Perhaps the Salahis were just taking the president at his word when he promised a new era of openness,” Carr suggests.

It’s just not special anymore, Carr argues, to see Barack Obama acting like a normal person, and it just might be bad for his presidency. But intuitive quotes from a VH1 exec and West Wing producer don’t do anything to support Carr blaming Obama, himself.

The Kennedys, Carr writes, balanced politics and celebrity correctly, and he quotes Jackie O saying, “I want to live my life, not record it.” But in the forty-plus years since JFK’s presidency, the press has become insatiable and Carr’s column avoids pointing the finger back at the cable news stations with 24-hours to fill, the struggling but celeb-obsessed magazine world, or yes, even the New York Times.

Last month, Mediaite’s Glynnis MacNicol suggested that politics are our new national pastime, and that media organizations were left scrambling as the 2008 election ended, with nothing compelling left to cover. “The answer increasingly appears to be that they will merely find other elections and/or turn everything into a race,” she wrote. That, or a reality show, apparently. And that’s not to say that the Obamas are not themselves complicit, but in Carr’s column one suspect — the media itself — gets off surprisingly unmentioned.

Responding to the story last night on Twitter, NYU professor and press critic Jay Rosen wondered about the assumption that the press know “what the right level of exposure is.” And if so, “How?” Salon’s editor-in-chief Joan Walsh put it thusly: “They’re blaming Obama for their bad, shallow, celebrity focused coverage of him.” That is, “it’s self-correction for the way they sold the Obama ‘brand’ (shallowly).” And though Carr’s column is indeed zingy, it might also be self-incriminating.

The Social Media Presidency [New York Times]

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