Obama concerned that Americans ‘almost occupy different realities’

Former President Obama said in a new interview that what most worries him is that Americans are occupying “different realities.”

“The thing that I’m most worried about is the degree to which we now have a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media, a splintered media,” Obama told “CBS Mornings” host Nate Burleson.

“Today what I’m most concerned about is the fact that, because of the splintering of the media we almost occupy different realities, right? If something happens that, you know, in the past everybody could say, ‘All right, we may disagree on how to solve it, but at least we all agree that, yeah, that’s an issue,'” he said.

“Now people will say, ‘Well, that didn’t happen,’ or, ‘I don’t believe that,’ or, ‘I don’t care about the science,’ or, ‘I’m not concerned about these experts, you know, ’cause they’re just all liberals’ or, you know, ‘That’s just conservative propaganda,'” he continued.

The former president noted that one of his goals of the Obama Foundation is to get people to agree on a “common set of facts.” He recounted that when he was growing up, there were only three TV channels where viewers can get a “similar sense of what is true and what isn’t, what was real and what was not.”

Obama also commented on gun control laws in the wake of recent mass shootings, saying that the United States was “unique among advanced developed nations in tolerating, on a routine basis, gun violence.”

“In Australia, you had one mass shooting, 50 years ago, and they said, ‘Oh, we’re not doing that anymore,'” he said. “That is normally how you would expect a society to respond when your children are at risk.”