{"id":28181,"date":"2015-05-12T12:57:56","date_gmt":"2015-05-12T19:57:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=28181"},"modified":"2015-05-13T09:37:48","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T16:37:48","slug":"president-obama-hits-fox-news-for-portraying-the-poor-as-sponges-and-leeches","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newscorpse.com\/ncWP\/?p=28181","title":{"rendered":"President Obama Hits Fox News For Portraying The Poor As Sponges And Leeches"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking at the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty at Georgetown University (video below), President Obama made an astute observation about one of the causes of persistent negative impressions of America’s underprivileged class. He noted that some elements in the media are deliberately disparaging poor people as “sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving”<\/em> and that, as a result, those false caricatures gain traction. Except that he was a bit more specific about the guilty media.<\/p>\n

“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 know where they find them. They’re all like ‘I don’t wanna work. I just want a free Obamaphone.’ 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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"Obama
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Obama could have gone much further and blasted Fox News for lying about the entire spectrum of progressive politics from trickle-down economics, to healthcare, to Climate Change, etc. But as this was a summit on poverty, the President kept a narrow focus on how Fox News stigmatizes the poor. His larger point was that by disseminating ugly stereotypes the media makes it more difficult for legislators to address real problems because their constituents have been infected with false impressions of the recipients of aid.<\/p>\n

It was a brilliant stroke to include the absurd “Obamaphone”<\/em> meme<\/a> that right-wingers latched unto as another fake atrocity that they could attribute to the president they are convinced is a gay Muslim from Kenya. However, Obama may have given his critics an opening to rant feverishly when he said that “We’re going to have to change how the media reports on these issues.”<\/em> Glenn Beck and his ilk will interpret that as a tyrannical dictate to control the press, rather just the desire for the media to be honest, fair, and avoid demonizing a sector of society that is already suffering.<\/p>\n

One thing we can rely on is that Fox News will throw a tantrum over these comments by Obama, as they always do when he correctly calls them out. Fox is all for free speech as long as it doesn’t contain any criticism of their blatantly dishonest propaganda.<\/p>\n

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