The way John Kerry sees it, there is no joy when the president goes on The View.

The secretary of state lamented the difficulty of governing in the modern media age during a visit to India Wednesday, nostalgically recalling the days "the big three" television networks owned the airwaves and assessing the burden of communicating the White House's message across a variety of media.

"If a president wants to talk to the nation, he or she has to go out and fight to find all kinds of different venues, which is why the President of the United States goes on The View and goes on David Letterman and goes on the night show and goes on whatever, in order to be able to talk to people in segments," Kerry said. "And it takes a lot longer to build it up, and you still have trouble getting people to be able assimilate and process facts."

The former presidential nominee said the diversified press made governing, including consensus-building, "harder". He took a particular shot at the "nanosecond" nature of Twitter—a much more rapid way of communicating than chatting during a coffee break the morning after the president delivered a speech.

"[W]hen I was a college student, the President of the United States, somebody from the press office, would call the media, one or two networks, and say, 'The president wants to talk to the nation tonight.' They'd block out a half-hour, and that was it. Everybody watched it. Because you had ABC, CBS, and NBC, and public television, I think, if I'm correct," Kerry said.

"And so the next day at work, everybody would go to work and would be talking around the water cooler or coffee station: 'Boy, did you hear what the president said last night? What do you think about what's happening in Vietnam, or what's happening here or whatever?' You'd have a conversation about it. That doesn't happen today."