President Obama Slams Fox News For Suggesting The Poor Are ‘Leeches’

While speaking at an event focusing on alleviating poverty in the United States earlier this week, President Obama took on the lies of Fox News when it comes to the poor, saying the network perpetuates and promotes stereotypes about the poor in order to attack him.

At the event, which took place at Georgetown University, President Obama remarked:

“I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction. 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. ‘I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obamaphone or whatever.’”

The President added that he believes Fox News is attempting to make middle-class voters “mad at folks on the bottom” as a way of pushing their own agenda, and continued:

“Very rarely do you hear an interview of a waitress, which is much more typical who is raising a couple of kids and doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.”

Fox is known for repeatedly suggesting that the poor in America are underprivileged due to a “lack of virtue” and also for continually attacking what Food Stamp recipients purchase with their benefits.

President Obama also said the problem of poverty needs to be part of a larger conversation on how all Americans can help move the country forward:

“If we’re going to change how John Boehner and Mitch McConnell think, we’re going to have to change how our body politic 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’s like to struggle in this economy looks like and how budgets connect to that. And that’s a hard process because that requires a much broader conversation than typically we have on the nightly news.”

This article was originally published by the same author at LiberalAmerica.org.

One thought on “President Obama Slams Fox News For Suggesting The Poor Are ‘Leeches’

  1. It’s getting real bad. I’m on Social Security disability and they are going to cut back to where we will have NOTHING. My rent goes up $100.00 or more every month. I get $800.00 a month after $104.00 is taken out for Medicare and the conservatives want to cut that back too. I worked for 40 or more years and paid into both Medicare and Social Security every month out of my paychecks. Why can’t we have that money we paid into. Conservatives are greedy boobs and should be paying into our Social Security.

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