Obama's Latest Swipe at Fox News

President Barack Obama again slammed Fox News on Tuesday, and how the news media covers issues of poverty.

“The effort to suggest the poor are sponges or leaches, don’t want to work, are lazy, or undeserving, got traction,” Obama said, speaking at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty in Washington. “It’s still being propagated. I have to say, if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant venue. They will find folks who make me mad. I don’t know where they find them. Right, they’re all like, 'I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obamaphone.’”

President Barack Obama addresses the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University in Washington, May 12, 2015. (NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

Obama was part of a summit panel at Georgetown University talking about poverty with Harvard University professor Robert Putnam, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, and liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne.

“That becomes an entire narrative that gets worked up,” Obama said. “You rarely hear an interview with a waitress, which is much more typical, who is raising a couple of kids who is doing everything right and still can’t pay the bills.”

Obama went on to talk about Republican leaders in the House and Senate, as well as the news media as a whole.

“So, if we are going to change the way John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, we are going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we are going to have to change how the media reports on these issues and how people’s impressions of what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like, and how budgets connect to that,” Obama said. “It’s a hard topic and requires a much broader conversation than typically we have on the nightly news.”