President Barack Obama spoke directly to political journalists on Monday night with a message that was part pep talk and part scolding to the Fourth Estate.

Obama delivered the keynote address at a dinner for this year's winner of an award for political reporting named for the late Robin Toner, who served as The New York Times' top political correspondent before her death in 2008, shortly after Obama's historic election.

Obama used the speech as yet another chance to decry the politics of Donald Trump, this time highlighting the media's role in the mogul's fact-indifferent campaign.

"It's worth asking ourselves what each of us — as politicians, as journalists, but most of all as citizens — may have done" to create the polarized political atmosphere, Obama said. "Some may be more to blame than others for the current climate, but all of us are responsible for reversing it."

Obama's White House, in the name of transparency, has made unprecedented levels of data available to the public at large, just as it has been pioneering in its efforts to get around the press corps' filter and speak directly to the public through livestreams, social media and targeted interviews with niche publications. On Monday, he lamented the breakdown of that filter, however, when it comes to Trump, though he did not specially use the Republican frontrunner's name.

The job of a political reporter, he said, is "more than just handing someone a microphone."

Obama continued, "It's to probe and to question and to dig deeper."

Obama expressed sympathy for reporters who are grappling with the changes in their industry, acknowledging that market forces and changing technology make it harder than ever for those driven by a sense of small-D democratic mission to fulfill it.

"The choice between what cuts into your bottom lines and what harms us as a society is important. You have to choose which price is higher to pay, which cost is harder to bear," Obama said.

"Good reporters," he continued, "find yourselves caught between competing forces, I'm aware of that. You believe in the importance of a well-informed electorate. You've staked your careers on it. Our democracy needs you more than ever. You're under significant financial pressures as well. So I believe the electorate would be better served if your networks and your producers would give you the room" to cover substance.

"In today's unprecedented change in your industry, the job's gotten tougher," Obama said. "The appetite for information and data flowing through the Internet is voracious," Obama said, yet "we've seen newsrooms closed, the bottom line has shrunk. The news cycle has as well."