In his last big interview of the year, President Barack Obama tackled his critics on ISIS, saying the media are partly to blame for the success of the Islamic State.
“If you’ve been watching television for the last month, all you have been seeing, all you have been hearing about is these guys with masks or black flags who are potentially coming to get you,” Obama said in a taped interview with NPR before leaving for vacation in Hawaii, the New York Post reported.
He also said there’s room for people to blame his administration, but not because the strategy hasn’t worked. According to the president, the blame lies with not doing a good enough job of convincing the American people that his strategy is working.
“This is not a huge industrial power that can pose great risks to us institutionally or in a systematic way, but they can hurt us, and they can hurt our people, our families,” he said.
Obama said the blame lies with his administration not doing a good enough job of convincing the American people that his strategy is not working.
But critics remain unconvinced that the ISIS threat revolves around a communications problem.
“Blaming such anxiety on faulty messaging and oversaturation of terror coverage by the networks might be a plausible assessment if there hadn’t been an actual pattern of recent attacks both at home and abroad, even as the president has written ISIS off as the junior varsity team and has focused more on the fate of the polar bear,” Stephen L. Miller said, writing in National Review.
“The Islamic State and its ideological affiliates are trying, and sometimes succeeding, to get us, and Americans have noticed,” Miller added.
