Jon Margolis is a political columnist for VTDigger.
Stop the presses! Bernie Sanders is complaining about the press, about how “the media” is treating his campaign for president.
Again?
Well, he’s not entirely wrong. But this is old news. Sanders, his aides and his most ardent followers have been griping about how their campaign has been covered by what he calls “the corporate media” for almost five years.
It’s good politics for them. The Sanders base includes folks who believe in conspiracies. Some of them seem convinced that corporate bigwigs collude with one another, and in some cases with the CIA and organized crime, to control the world. See, for example, the current movie, “The Irishman,” which, whatever its cinematic virtues, relies on what may politely be called junk history.
Sanders himself has not alleged any intricate conspiracies. His latest gripe is simply that “the corporate media” isn’t giving his campaign enough coverage because it thinks he can’t win.
“The corporate media wants you to think our campaign is over,” he proclaims at the outset of a two-minute, 23-second television commercial. “Let me be blunt: I am back and more ready than ever to end the corruption of corporate elites.”
But there’s little doubt that behind the “corporate elite” label is the suggestion that because most big news organizations are owned by corporations, and because most corporate bigwigs are against Sanders, those bigwigs are coercing their reporters, editors, and producers to slant the news in an anti-Sanders direction.
Or that the bigwigs only hire editors and news directors who share their socio-economic views and who will therefore hire only reporters who are as anti-Sanders as (to use the terms the journalists themselves use) the bean counters and suits in the corporate suites.
Has that ever happened?
Oh, no doubt. Everything one can possibly imagine has happened.
But that leftish conspiratorial assessment of “the corporate media” rarely describes reality. The bean counters care mostly about the bottom line and half the time don’t even read the paper or watch the network they control. They leave the coverage to the news professionals, who are trying to get good stories, not caring which candidate gets hurt or helped.
If those news professionals find Sanders annoying, it’s probably not because of his views, which some of them share. It may be because he keeps scolding them.
Back in 2015, when Sanders first complained about his press coverage, a study by the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy showed that he had a point: He had been getting less coverage than his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.
But it was more favorable coverage. The problem wasn’t that journalists (or the corporate suits) were against Sanders. They just considered him “a likely loser.”
Not all major news organizations are corporate-owned. NPR and PBS are not, though they depend partly on corporate contributions. And corporate or not, many influential outlets are run by people who agree with Sanders on most issues. Their coverage of him has often been critical, but not because they are serving their corporate masters; they attack corporations, too.
The Washington Post is owned not by a corporation but by a guy – Jeff Bezos. A very rich guy, and one who has been criticized (with some justification) by Sanders for the pay and working conditions at firms Bezos owns.
The criticism worked. Bezos announced in October that all workers at Amazon and Whole Foods would earn at least $15 an hour. Sanders then praised him. There is no evidence that the Post gave Sanders more favorable treatment after that praise. In fact, there is no evidence that Bezos interferes in the Post’s coverage at all.
“Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest,” Post Editor Marty Baron wrote last year.
They can and they do.
It isn’t that the leftish complaint about “the corporate media” is inaccurate. But neither is the conservative complaint about “the liberal media.” News coverage is more likely to be liberal on social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion rights than the economic issues that Sanders emphasizes. But it isn’t so conservative on those issues, either; few major news organizations editorialized on behalf of the 2017 tax cut bill.
One reason Sanders gets less attention from the press is that part of “news” is “new,” and not much about Sanders is new. Whatever else he is, he’s consistent. He’s been saying the same thing in the same way for years.
Writing in the reliably left-of-center Nation magazine, its national affairs correspondent, Jeet Heer, observed that “Sanders’s support has been unusually sticky, which makes him boring in simple horse race terms. Also, since he’s run before, he’s not news in the way many of his rivals are.”
So campaign coverage is without flaws?
Not hardly, and among its flaws is its obsession with polls. As Sanders slipped in most polls from last spring until about November, he got less coverage.
Now that his poll numbers seem to have perked up, “the Bernie Blackout” may be over, as a headline in the online magazine Salon noted, and the Sanders campaign is proclaiming that “Bernie is back.”
Maybe, or maybe the corporate and/or liberal media is misreading these polls. Sanders’ standing has improved in the last few weeks, less because the percentage of likely Democratic voters supporting him has gone up than because the numbers for his rivals had gone down. So he’s gone from third to second or in some cases to first in various polls without getting much more support.
Sanders ran second to former Vice President Joe Biden in the most recent nationwide poll – a Harvard-Harris survey completed last Saturday. Second sounds pretty impressive. But he only had the support of 17% of the sample.
He’s doing better in Iowa and better yet in New Hampshire. He is tenacious and his supporters are steadfast. You know that’s true because it’s been noted so often in the corporate media.
