Obama: Fox News Very Effective at Turning People Against Helping Poor

BARACK OBAMA: “American politics where you’ve got the middle class and question has been, who are you mad at? If you’re struggling. If you’re working but don’t seem to be getting ahead and over the last 40 years, sadly, I think there’s been an effort to either make folks mad at folks at the top or to make — be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches or don’t want to work, or lazy, you know, undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I mean, I have to say that if you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu, they will find folks who make me mad, I don’t even know where they find them. (Laughter)

"I don’t want to work. I just want a free Obama phone or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative that gets worked up and very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical who’s raising a couple of kids and is doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills. And so if we’re going to change how John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, we’re going to have to change how our body politics thinks, which means we’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues and how people’s impressions of what it — what it’s like to struggle in this economy looks like and how budgets connect to that. That’s a hard process because of — that requires a much broader conversation then typically we have on the Nightly News.”