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An excerpt from a roundtable held at Georgetown University in Washington on Tuesday. Obama: Fox News portrays poor people as 'leeches'

President Barack Obama criticized Fox News on Tuesday, accusing the network of portraying poor people as "leeches."

In a discussion at Georgetown University, Obama said the media made an effort to “suggest the poor are sponges, leeches, don't want to work, are lazy, are undeserving," and he then singled out Fox News for special rebuke.

“If you watch Fox News on a regular basis, it is a constant menu. They'll find folks who make me mad," the president said. "I don't know where they find them. It's like, 'I don't want to work, I just want a free Obama phone.'

"That becomes an entire narrative that gets worked up. 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," he said.

Obama's appearance at Georgetown was part of the Catholic-Evangelical Leadership Summit on Overcoming Poverty. He appeared on a panel with Harvard University's Robert Putnam and American Enterprise Institute's Arthur Brooks. The discussion was moderated by The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne.

The president concluded his remarks about the media by suggesting that a change in public perception about poverty was necessary to changing the minds of Republican lawmakers.

"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," he said.