President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference with college students on April 28. | AP Photo Obama vents about being 'picked on' by the press

President Barack Obama did a bit of venting on Thursday, saying he sometimes feels “picked on” by the press and griping that reporters are often more interested in writing about what’s broken rather than what’s working.

The president shared his frustrations after he surprised college reporters who were visiting the White House on Thursday, taking Josh Earnest's place and answering questions.


He seemed to revel in the less combative atmosphere, lingering for almost 40 minutes as he fielded questions and discussed voting rights, campaign finance, college affordability and immigration.

While he spoke about the virtues of a free press, he also talked about the personal downside.

“Sometimes both Josh and I probably have our disagreements with the press corps and feel picked on and misunderstood," Obama said as the students in the room laughed. “But the truth of the matter is, and I’ve said this before, what separates us out in part from a lot of other countries in the world is we’ve got this incredible free press that pokes and prods and calls into account our leaders.”

Toward the end of the briefing, Obama said the college students “as journalists are going to have a role to play in reducing cynicism.”

“It is very hard to get good stories placed. People will assign you stories about what’s not working. It’s very hard for you to write a story about, ‘Wow, this thing really works good,’” he said.

He pointed to government workers who are “doing great work. And you rely on it in all kinds of ways.”

“But we just take that for granted. And if out of those 2 million employees, one person screws up somewhere — which every day you can count on somebody out of 2 million people probably doing something they shouldn’t be doing — that’s what’s going to get reported on,” Obama said. “Now, that helps keep government on its toes and accountable, but one of the things we have to think about is how do we tell a story about the things we do together that actually work so that people don’t feel so cynical overall.”

