“Are you a socialist?” may be the most-discussed of the questions the New York Times posed during its first formal sit-down with President Obama Friday afternoon, but it looks like the paper also went with a version of that old gotcha question Katie Couric threw at Gov. Sarah Palin last fall (and Obama’s answer, while more succinct than Palin’s, wasn’t much more specific):
Q:…[W]hat are you reading these days? What kind of newspapers do you read, do you read the clips, do you read actual papers, do you watch television?
A: Other than The New York Times?
Q: Other than The New York Times. Do you read Web sites? What Web sites do you look at?
A: I read most of the big national papers.
Q. Do you read them in clips or do you read them in the paper?
A. No, I read the paper. I like the feel of a newspaper. I read most of the weekly newsmagazines. I may not read them from cover to cover but I’ll thumb through them. You know, I spend most of my time these days reading a lot of briefings.
Q: And television? Do you watch? Web sites?
A: I don’t watch much television, I confess.
Q: And Web sites?
Q: No blogs?
A: I rarely read blogs.
More on why President Obama doesn’t read blogs (from the Times story based on the above interview):
Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.…[H]e said he did not find blogs to be reliable, citing the economy as one example.
“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”
