Barack Obama, the last Democratic POTUS, was reportedly a big Apple fan. And his successor, President-elect Joe Biden, is supposedly an Apple guy as well — more specifically Apple News.
Evan Osnos, CNN’s newest contributor and author of Joe Biden: The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now, says Biden “relies on Apple News to help him get headlines from … reputable media sources.”
The news comes from Brian Stelter’s latest “Reliable Sources” column:
“The president-elect’s media diet is what we would call the classics,” Osnos said. “He relies on things like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. He reads some of The Economist and The New Yorker. A lot of it in print. He also relies on Apple News to help him get headlines from other reputable media sources. What he is not doing, of course, is reading things like Newsmax, he’s not watching One America News Network.”
A journalist who has written about Biden name-checking an Apple app is far from a slam-dunk “Biden loves Apple and will help the company” conclusion, of course. I don’t mean it like that. There are plenty of questions about what a Biden presidency will mean for Apple.
On the one hand, there will probably be less turbulence for Apple than there was with President Donald Trump, who loved Apple one day and, the next, tweeted about how terrible the iPhone UI is. (Yes, that actually happened.) Apple will probably have an easier job of recruiting overseas talent and protecting the Dreamers among its workforce. But Democrats also could ramp up the tech industry antitrust investigations.
However, the casual mention of Apple News as a non-biased aggregator of mainstream news is interesting. The service isn’t one of Apple’s best-known products, although usage continues to increase. But the notion that the president-elect uses it to find which news is worth reading online… well, that’s kind of a nifty endorsement.
Now if only he could say something nice about Apple Arcade and Apple News+ it might give those services a much-needed boost.
Source: CNN
