President Obama is ripping Fox News and calling the network out by name while debunking their class warfare propaganda.
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While speaking at Georgetown University, the President called out Fox News by name:
But part of it has also been — there’s always been a strain in American politics where you’ve got the middle class, and the question has been, who are you mad at, if you’re struggling; if you’re working, but you 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 be mad at folks at the bottom. And I think the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leaches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are 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 know where they find them. They’re like, I don’t want to work, I just want a free Obama phone — or whatever. And that becomes an entire narrative — right? — 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 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.
The President’s remarks came two days after Fox News’s Chris Wallace whined on the air that the Obama White House will not send officials to be guests on his show unless they appear on all five Sunday shows.
Obama was correct. Fox News has spent years mining the class and racial divides in American society for financial and partisan political gain. You will hardly ever see an interview with an ordinary American on Fox that doesn’t contain an attack on Democrats and President Obama.
The “average American” on Fox News looks exactly like the silent majority that Richard Nixon appealed to when Roger Ailes worked on his presidential campaign decades ago. Fox News reaffirms all of the stereotypes about poor people on a regular basis. In Fox world, people are poor because they don’t want to work, or they aren’t working hard enough.
Fox News never features the person who has to work two minimum wage jobs in the service sector just pay rent and keep food on the table. The people that Fox News likes to pretend don’t exist are who the president was talking about. Obama was speaking for those people who Fox News has demonized while become the nation’s top Fox News propaganda buster.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
