(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.)
[S]eemingly every national media outlet reported the news. But the headline that asked “Could Bernie Sanders Win the Nomination After His Surprise Indiana Victory?” came from an unlikely source:
People magazine.
Announcing his presidential bid a year ago, the senator once received so little press — ABC’s “World News Tonight” gave him all of 18 seconds — his campaign issued a statement in December titled “Why the Bernie Blackout on Corporate Network News?”
Then, after a string of primary and caucus victories, Sanders surpassed Republican front-runner Donald Trump for the most Sunday television news show appearances this campaign, currently at 76.
Now, losing to fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton recently in several large states, Sanders has gone from speaking on four shows two weeks ago to one last week to, for the first time this year, none this week. But that hasn’t stopped a spectrum of other outlets from covering the Vermonter.
Take People, which reported Sanders’ surprise win in last week’s Indiana primary alongside such pop-culture bombshells as “Beyonce’s Confessions,” “Inside Kelly & Michael’s Blowup” and “Khloé Kardashian Is Launching a Mysterious New Denim Project.”
Then there’s a Slate story and video headlined “What Is the Bernie Sanders Aesthetic?” which pictures the candidate viewing illustrations of himself in a traveling “The Art of a Political Revolution” show by street artists and graffiti writers.
“Bernie’s draw is that he is the champion of the 99 percent — in fact, that’s all he and his voters ever talk about,” says the video’s narrator. “So it makes sense that the art being made for his campaign is as anti-establishment as he is.”
Cue the candidate, escorting his grandchildren, and he eyes a white-tufted Muppet-like puppet.
“I’ve got to tell you,” he says, “on a personal level, it is a little bit weird to see all these guys that look like me on the wall.”
Sanders also is making plenty of prom news. An Inquisitr story on last weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner — known to participants as the “Nerd Prom” — plays up the presence of the first deaf winner of “America’s Next Top Model,” current “Dancing With the Stars” contestant Nyle DiMarco.
“The lengthy list of celebrity attendees also included big names like Will Smith, Kerry Washington, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Morgan Freeman,” the Inquisitr reports. “However, DiMarco was more interested in meeting one of the Nerd Prom’s real VIPs: Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders.”
That caused social media to share not only a Twitter photo of the two — “Bernie and I at #WHCD!! He hugged me after I encouraged him to consider Deaf Education!” — but also a YouTube video of DiMarco demonstrating the top 30 trending American Sign Language terms, with “Bernie Sanders” on the same list as “hashtag” and “chill.”
Not to be outdone, the website Revelist.com is offering the world-exclusive headline “This Genius Teen Took Bernie Sanders to Prom and They Had the Best Time Ever” atop a story picked up by outlets from Teen Vogue to Britain’s Telegraph.
“An avid Sanders supporter, Chloe Raynaud ditched the typical date and brought a life-size cardboard cutout of the senator to prom,” the Revelist reports.
“During the slow dance I brought him out,” the student is quoted. “Then my friends made him crowd surf.”
The candidate, back on his own two feet, has moved on to this month’s remaining votes Tuesday in West Virginia and May 17 in Kentucky and Oregon.
“Sanders is well-positioned for wins in the upcoming West Virginia and Oregon primaries,” Politico writes in a story headlined “Sanders Poised For May Win Streak.” “That might explain his it’s-just-a-flesh-wound approach to the nearly insurmountable delegate math confronting him, and his dogged insistence that he’s taking his long-shot presidential campaign all the way to the July Democratic convention.”
