Somehow or other, these sorts of utterances from Obama never quite find their way into the mainstream media.

Speaking at his recent summit on poverty, the president ripped into Fox News for their coverage of poverty issues:

Breitbart:

Speaking of Fox News, the poor, and the way GOP leaders think, Obama said, [W]e’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.”

Here is the full transcript:

I think that the effort to suggest that the poor are sponges, leeches, don’t want to work, are lazy, are undeserving, got traction. And look, it’s still being propagated. I have to say that 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. They’re all like, “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 is raising a couple of kids and doing everything right but still can’t pay the bills.

And so, if we’re going to change how Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) 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.

After seven failed years, to watch Obama sit there and discuss the poor as though he is part of the solution and not the problem, is laughable.

Indeed, as Jim Nolte points out:

For going on seven years we have learned three things about President Obama: 1) He loves the poor so much he continues to create more of them. 2) He loves the poor so much he does everything in his power to keep them poor. 3) He doesn’t see the opposition as loyal, but as bad players — his enemy.

When the president of the United States suggests that the way the media reports stories has to be changed, he is issuing a threat to manage the news.  Few presidents have ever liked the media, but none except Obama has suggested, even elliptically, that "we" – the government – have to manage how the news is reported.