President Barack Obama is making two significant out-of-the-Oval-Office appearances on our screens this week. Photo / Deborah Schildt
President Barack Obama is making two significant out-of-the-Oval-Office appearances on our screens this week. Photo / Deborah Schildt
President Barack Obama is making two significant out-of-the-Oval-Office appearances on our screens this week, taking matters into his own hands to raise awareness of two different issues while stretching those long legs. First he's joined up with Bear Grylls for a short expedition to Alaska as part of Grylls' RunningWild series.
The pair share tea made out of flower clusters, eat wild salmon picked over by a bear, talk about fatherhood, and discuss climate change on a September trek to Alaska's shrinking Exit Glacier - all while snipers keep watch from the mountains and the official food taster looks on warily.
Last year alone, the Exit Glacier melted and retreated 57m toward the Harding ice field, which has lost 10 per cent of its mass since 1950. It was actually the White House who suggested the idea for the episode.
"They approached us, saying would we consider taking the president on an adventure to Alaska. I almost didn't really believe it. I thought this was a spoof," Grylls said. And despite the fact there were more than 50 Secret Service personnel involved in the day-long trek through a forest and across a glacial outwash, Grylls said Obama threw himself into the adventure wholeheartedly, shrugging off the food taster, sharing Grylls' water bottle, lighting fires and eating berries.
"He didn't have any problems. He wanted the physicality ... he was up for everything."
Obama's second appearance this week is on the Vice Special Report: Fixing The System, where he joins Vice's Shane Smith to investigate the US' damaged prison system.
They head to El Reno Federal Prison in Oklahoma - the first time a sitting president has ever visited a federal prison - to look at the pervasive impact of America's approach to crime and imprisonment.
Speaking to prisoners, prison workers, families, the judiciary, and community reformers, they take stock of all the promises and politics that have fed America's overcrowded prison system for the past 30 years. They investigate how Congress and the President can come together to implement prison reforms in a country which espouses freedom, but has nearly 7 million people in the correctional system.
