President Obama told a group of college journalists at the White House Thursday that "I'm counting on you" to help inform their peers and lead the country.
"If you participate and you take the time to be informed about the issues and you actually turn out and your peers turn out, you change the country," he said. "You do. It may not always happen as fast as you'd like, but you'll change it. So, I'll keep on talking about this even after I leave the presidency.
"So I'm counting on you guys. Don't let me down. All right? Don't let the country down. You guys are going to be delivering the message to your peer group that this is the greatest country on earth, but only because we have great citizens who are willing to invest their time and energy and effort to become informed on the issues, to argue about it in a respectful way, and to try to collectively solve the many challenges that we face. The good news is that there is no challenges, as JFK said,d that man creates that man can't solve. I would add women to that."
Obama then left to a round of applause from the audience.
Despite the media's often friendly coverage of him, Obama has not always treated the press in kind.
Obama has been very vocal about the partisanship in media and Congress recently, recently saying that it marks the biggest regret during his administration.
He also scolded the press in recent remarks for not doing an adequate job in its coverage of the 2016 White House race, declaring that it's not enough to simply give someone a microphone.
This administration has had many examples of not being as transparent and bipartisan as it set out to be, even setting a record for withholding FOIA requests.