In subtle dig at Donald Trump, Barack Obama says watching TV or reading social media 'clouds your judgment' as a leader
Former president Barack Obama has a piece of advice for his successor Donald Trump over handling public communication medium though it is unlikely that the Republican will give it much heed. Obama, who was in the White House between 2009 and 2017, said during a speech at an event at San Francisco-based international data and software firm Splunk that Twitter and TV can "cloud your judgement" as the president.
The 58-year-old said this when asked how he analyzed information during his presidency. He also laid stress on the job of building a good team to stay informed.
For observers, this was a not-so-subtle dig at Trump for whom TV and Twitter are two major avenues of information gathering and disseminating. The current president says that he doesn’t watch much TV but regularly makes comments on various news channels, especially Fox News. On Twitter, too, the president is even active at odd hours and the micro-blogging platform is his most trusted medium of connection than the mainstream media which he hates.
"The other thing that is helpful is not watching TV or reading social media. Those are two things I would advise, if you're our president, not to do. It creates a lot of noise and clouds your judgment,” he said.
284 tweets in 6 months
On Wednesday, too, Trump did not deviate from his TV-and-Twitter routine. He thanked his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski after his appearance on ‘Fox and Friends’ and then went on to retweet a false claim against Democratic Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. He also retweeted favorable words about him tweeted by a right-wing commentor. According to an analysis by Axios that came out in May this year, Trump tweeted 284 times a month in the last six months till then which was more than the volume of tweets posted prior to that. However, the report also added that despite the increase in frequency, Trump is getting less engagement on his posts today.
Obama, the first black president to lead the US, also said that as the chief executive, he benefited by hearing from a team that had a diversity of opinion. In Trump’s era, however, diversity of opinion hasn’t been as aptly rewarded.