A humorous skit during this weekend’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner was a good-natured collaboration with comedian, Keegan Michael Key, portraying the underlying parallelism of President Barack Obama’s so-called “rage.” Yet, as commentators fawn over Obama’s satire of American media, the president of the United States reveals a deeper message through the jokes and laughter.
The dialogue primarily details the frustrations of the 24-hour news cycle system and how it exhausts topics, such as the Ebola crisis, as pointed out in the clip. American news networks, such as CNN, have infamously exploited audience members with the broadcasting of the same news topics by allowing everything to seem “breaking” and “headlining.” As Jeff Sorenson of the Huffington Post points out, “Journalism is now clipped to a sentence that scrolls at the bottom of the screen.” Consumers of media and technology spur this cycle, as demand for constant information grows through the activities of social media and the expediency of the Internet.
But as some do not fail to point out, the battle for ratings between news networks drive the demand for the output of the most dramatic stories, rather than objective information reporting hard hitting evidence and issues. This is further stated in President Obama’s “rage,” portrayed by Key, as he focuses upon the “big challenges,” such as climate change and “passively” critiques the media portrayal of the Obama Administration’s handling of the BP Oil Spill in 2010.
Through these messages, thrown together with some shameless endorsement for the Democratic party (and a plug-in for Hilary Clinton’s fundraising for her presidential campaign), Obama succeeds in simply vocalizing what is and has been on everyone’s mind.