Media should ask tougher questions to presidential candidates: Obama

United States President Barack Obama laid a forceful critique of politicians and political journalists who cover Presidential elections for a circuslike environment and urged the journalists to ask tougher questions to the candidates vying to be the president.

Obama was speaking at a journalism awards dinner, in honor of Robin Toner, a longtime political reporter for The New York Times who died in 2008.

The President said that the 2016 campaign had become "entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis," a coarse spectacle that was tarnishing the American brand around the world, reports the New York Times.

He expressed dismay over the vulgar rhetoric, violence at rallies and unrealistic campaign pledges that have grabbed attention making headlines, in reference to Republican front-runner Donald Trump.

"The number one question I'm getting as I travel around the world or talk to world leaders right now is, what is happening in America about our politics? It's not because around the world people have not seen crazy politics. It is that they understand America is the place where you can't afford completely crazy politics," the Guardian quoted him as saying.

He added that it was not because the people across the world have not seen crazy politics but because, it is that they understand America is the place where you can't afford completely crazy politics.

"When our elected officials and our political campaigns become entirely untethered to reason and facts and analysis, when it doesn't matter what's true and what's not, that makes it all but impossible for us to make good decisions on behalf of future generations," said Obama.

The President suggested that the news media had not done enough to question the promises made by politicians, a reference to only to Trump, but also to Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

"When people put their faith into someone who can't possibly deliver his or her own promises," he said.

The President addressing an audience of newspaper proprietors in addition to editors and reporters, highlighted that despite their shrinking newsrooms and profit margins, they needed to plow money into investigative journalism.

The President said that the media landscape has changed since his first presidential campaign in 2008, when there was a price if you said one thing and then did something completely different.