(Editor’s note: “Bernie Briefing” is a weekly campaign-season look at how Vermont U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is playing in the national media.)
[B]ack in December, Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign drafted a news release complaining it was “all but ignored on the flagship television network newscasts.” This month, the Tyndall Report, which monitors content on ABC, CBS and NBC, found the big-three half-hour nightly newscasts covered the candidate for a total of 11 minutes the week after his New Hampshire primary win.
Sound small? It’s anything but.
“That was more than the amount of coverage given to Hillary Clinton (eight minutes), Donald Trump (seven minutes) and Marco Rubio (five minutes),” CNN reporter Tom Kludt writes. “It was also the first week in the current election cycle that network news coverage of Sanders outpaced any other presidential candidate.”
Playing up Sanders appears to be paying off — for the press. The right-leaning “Fox News Sunday,” for example, booked the self-described democratic socialist on its Valentine’s Day show — the first time he appeared since announcing his presidential run — and scored its highest ratings in three months, Adweek’s FishbowlDC blog reports.
Perhaps that’s why Fox profiled Sanders’ senior adviser Tad Devine this Sunday in its “Power Player of the Week” segment. The candidate himself, appearing on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” CNN’s “State of the Union” and NBC’s “Meet the Press” aimed to pivot from Saturday’s narrow caucus loss in Nevada to primaries in South Carolina this coming weekend and a dozen other states on Super Tuesday, March 1.
“We move on,” Sanders said on “Meet the Press.” “The last poll I saw in my own state of Vermont had us at 80 percent, so I think we got a shot to win there. I think we will surprise people in some other states as well. We are in this race to the convention.”
In other news:
— Nevada, glass-half-empty headlines: The Daily Beast’s “Did Hillary Clinton Just Finish Bernie Sanders Off?” the New Yorker’s “Bernie Sanders Has a Tough Road Ahead of Him” and U.S. News & World Report’s “Bernie Sanders is No Barack Obama.”
— Nevada, glass-half-full headlines: ABC News’ “Despite Hillary Clinton’s Win in Nevada, Bernie Sanders Continues to Be a Serious Threat,” Business Insider’s “Bernie: My close loss in Nevada shows I ‘can win anywhere’” and FiveThirtyEight’s “Bernie Sanders’s Path to the Nomination” (the latter of which unfolds a “states he needs to win” map through California’s big-finish primary on June 7).
— In a story headlined “Why Bernie Sanders Wins Even If He Loses,” Politico notes the candidate, after campaigning this month in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, will face contests in 22 states between March 1 and 15 that, in turn, could help him even if he doesn’t reap enough votes to carry the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia on July 25-28.
“As long as his base sticks with him, and maintains his ability to collect delegates, he will have no incentive to drop out,” Politico contributing editor Bill Scher writes. “Why? Because if you have delegates, you can make demands.”
“Sanders himself probably cares less about the VP slot — he’s too old to treat it as a steppingstone to the presidency — than he does about controlling the party’s platform,” Scher continues. “The stronger the Sanders minority, the more plausible it would be to force, and possibly win, floor votes on stricter Wall Street rules, rejecting corporate campaign cash and single-payer health care. Relitigating disagreements from the primary would complicate efforts to present a united front at the convention but would serve Sanders’ long-term goal of transforming the party.”
— And finally, syndicated alternative editorial cartoonist Ted Rall will sign copies of his new illustrated biography, “Bernie,” on Feb. 28 at 3 p.m. at Manchester’s Northshire Bookstore. The 208-page paperback, which Rall created after interviewing Sanders, debuted this month at No. 8 on the New York Times paperback graphic books best-seller list.
