WATCH: Bernie Sanders Slams 'Very Smart' Divisive Antigay Republicans

Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has no love lost for his Republican foes, but he's also had it with a national media he sees as hyper-focused on making "conflict between the candidates, rather than talking about the real issues, impacting the American people."

Video from a Sunday campaign event in Dubuque, Iowa shows the Vermont Senator laying into his Republican colleagues, in response to a reporter's question about why Americans seem to "vote against their own economic self-interest."

"I think the Republicans have done a brilliant job over the years -- they're very smart guys -- in dividing people on a million different issues" Sanders explained. "They divide people on gay marriage. They divide people on abortion. They divide people on immigration. And what my job is, and it's not just in blue states, believe me, we're going to go to red states, we're going to conservative states, is to bring working people together around an agenda that works for their kids and works for their parents. Raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour, having a trade policy that creates jobs in America, not in China, making sure that all our of kids can get a college education regardless of their income, fighting for pay equity for women workers. We have an agenda that I believe can bring people together, and when we do that, we're going to win this election very easily I think."

But Sanders wasn't willing to launch similar salvos toward Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

"Time after time, I'm being asked to criticize Hillary Clinton, that's the sport that you guys like," Sanders told a Wall Street Journal reporter who asked the Senator about distinctions between himself and his rival candidate. He continued:

"The issue I want to be talking about is the collapse of the American middle class. Are you guys going to write about that? Is that an important issue? The need for millions of decent-paying jobs, the obscenity of the kind of level of income and wealth inequality that we have today. The reason our campaign is doing well is because people are responding to those issues, so I am not going to get into the game of sitting around attacking Hillary Clinton. We disagree, [but] if I have anything to say about it, we're going to have a respectful, intelligent debate about it."

Watch Sanders sound off in the video below: