If you believe that book (or any number of others) you may as well believe
everything that you hear on Foxnews. In all cases it is just different heads of
the same corporate capitalist media blitz.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Thursday, November 21, 2019 12:37 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] The Corporate Media's War Against Bernie Sanders Is
Very Real
I don't know if I mentioned it, but We've Got People, the book about the
Democratic Party by ryan Grinn from The Intercept, has been on BARD for a few
weeks, amazingly. He just wrote it and kept sending out emails, advertising it.
It's a fascinating and disturbing narrative about how the party has been
functioning, recently. If you have any delusions about the party, this book
will demolish them. But it also describes how hopeful young people are trying
to make things better.
Miriam
The Corporate Media's War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real By Luke Savage,
Jacobin
20 November 19
A new report offers hard evidence for what you already suspected: MSNBC is
riding hard against Bernie.
Supporters of Bernie Sanders have long been accustomed to the nagging feeling
that the candidate they champion rarely, if ever, receives a balanced treatment
in the mainstream media. Many have also grown used to hearing this impression
questioned — characterized as the product of a self-imposed victim complex or a
figment of the imagination.
There’s never been any dearth of anecdotal evidence of the media’s systemic
bias against Sanders. When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah declared that Sanders
“[makes my] skin crawl . . . [though I] can’t even identify . . . what exactly
it is,” she inadvertently summed up the sentiment of generalized but virulent
contempt that often characterizes the way Sanders and his campaign are
discussed on the airwaves and in marquee newspapers. Though there are simply
too many cases to list, examples abound of selective reporting of polls,
cartoonish torquing of infographics, erasure of facts or figures favorable to
Sanders, and outright lying — at the supposedly liberal-leaning MSNBC in
particular.
The week of Sanders’s launch, former Hillary Clinton staffer Zerlina Maxwell
(introduced by the host simply as an “MSNBC analyst”) was allowed to insist on
air that Sanders hadn’t “mentioned race or gender until twenty-three minutes”
into his launch speech — a claim that was entirely inaccurate. On another
occasion, Chuck Todd discussed a Quinnipiac poll and claimed it showed Sanders
had gone down by five points — whereas, in fact, it had shown the exact
opposite. An April 29 segment on the Rachel Maddow Show used blatant
cherry-picking of donor data to suggest Sanders had raised “twice as much money
from male donors” as female donors — a claim that both flew in the face of the
nearly 50-50 gender split among his first-quarter donors and the strong
likelihood that he actually had the highest number of female donors overall.
MSNBC, of course, is hardly the only culprit. As Katie Halper documented a few
months ago, the New York Times reporter assigned to cover his campaign
“consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’s temperament, history,
policies, and political prospects.” The Washington Post once famously ran
sixteen negative stories about Sanders in the same number of hours, and its
in-house “fact checker,” Glenn Kessler, has himself racked up enough Pinocchios
to stuff a landfill with elongated wooden noses.
Nonetheless, a new and systematic look at MSNBC’s recent campaign coverage
offers an astonishing empirical snapshot of the media bias facing Sanders in
his quest for the Democratic nomination — in this case, from what is ostensibly
America’s liberal cable network. Limiting its analysis to coverage of the
race’s three leading candidates by the network’s major prime-time shows — The
11th Hour with Brian Williams, All In with Chris Hayes, The Beat with Ari
Melber, Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,
and the Rachel Maddow Show — in August and September, the study published by In
These Times (and authored by Jacobin’s own Branko Marcetic) should lay to rest
once and for all the notion that media bias against the Vermont senator is a
figment of his supporters’ imaginations.
Among other things, Sanders received far less coverage than either Joe Biden or
Elizabeth:
In its August and September coverage, by total mentions, MSNBC talked about
Biden twice as often as Warren and three times as often as Sanders. By number
of episodes, 64% of the 240 episodes discussed Biden, 43% discussed Warren and
36% discussed Sanders. A quarter of the episodes only discussed Biden, compared
to 5% and 1% that mentioned only Warren or Sanders, respectively.
When the network’s talking heads did mention Sanders, their coverage was most
likely to be critical in tone. Negative mentions of Sanders far outstripped
those of Biden or Warren, with the latter receiving the highest number of
positive mentions:
Of the three candidates, Sanders was least likely to be mentioned positively
(12.9% of his mentions) and most likely to be mentioned negatively (20.7%). The
remaining two-thirds of his mentions were neutral . . . Warren had the lowest
proportion of negative coverage of all three candidates (just 7.9% of all her
mentions) and the highest proportion of position mentions (30.6%).
MSNBC’s determination to frame Sanders’s campaign and its prospects in the
least favorable light emerge in a number of ways. Deploying familiar tropes
about electability and obsessing over poll results, the network’s coverage
frequently portrayed Sanders’s proposals as unrealistic and lacking in detail,
suggested his campaign was losing steam even when the available evidence
indicated otherwise, and boosted demonstrably incorrect claims about the
demographic breakdown of his support. For example:
In a later episode, Matthews and The Root’s Johnson claimed African American
women were “leaving Bernie” and “breaking for Warren,” even though a Pew
Research Center poll that week showed Sanders’ base to be the least white (49%)
of the leading four candidates (including Sen. Kamala Harris), Warren’s was
whitest (71%), and all four had about 50% women supporters.
With record-breaking fundraising numbers, large rallies, and polls showing a
competitive position in crucial early states, Sanders clearly continues to
generate enthusiasm from voters. Just don’t expect to hear about it on network
TV.
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