Truthdig
Why Is the Corporate Media So Hostile Toward Bernie Sanders?
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_is_corporate_media_hostility_toward_
bernie_sanders_so_strong_20170620/
Posted on Jun 20, 2017
By Norman Solomon
Bernie Sanders at a Democratic National Committee rally in April. (Matt
York / AP
(http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Sanders-Democratic-Rally-Arizona/421
4665ea8b84b96a8ec40748409395c/37/0) )
It's routine for right-wing outlets like Fox to smear progressive activists
under the guise of "news" coverage. But why The New York Times? And why the
special venom for Bernie Sanders?
After the horrific June 14 shooting of Congressman Steve Scalise and three
other participants in a Republican baseball practice, the media floodgates
opened for slimy innuendos. Before the day was done, a major supplier of the
political sewage was the New York Times, which prominently published a
left-blaming article
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/us/politics/bernie-sanders-supporters.ht
ml) that masqueraded as news reporting.
The media watch group FAIR pointed out
(http://fair.org/home/action-alert-with-sleazy-innuendo-nyt-lays-virginia-at
tack-at-bernie-sanders-feet/) that the Times piece "started with a false
premise and patched together a dodgy piece of innuendo and
guilt-by-association in order to place the blame for a shooting in Virginia
on 'the most ardent supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders.' "
It would be a mistake to think that the Times story was only the result of
bias inflamed by the grisly shooting spree. A few days earlier, the
newspaper had front-paged another "news" story
(https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/11/us/democrats-midterm-elections.html)
hostile to grassroots political forces aligned with Bernie-a de facto
editorial masquerading as news coverage, headlined: "Democrats in
Split-Screen: The Base Wants It All. The Party Wants to Win."
READ: New York Times Smears Bernie Sanders in Its Latest Lurch to the Right
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/new_york_times_shamefully_smears_bernie
_sanders_20170619)
In a bizarre disconnect from electoral reality, the article portrayed a
party establishment that had lost election after election, including a
cataclysmic loss to Trump, as being about winning. And the article portrayed
the party's activist base as interfering with the establishment's winning
ways.
Such Times stories are now operating under a heightened sense of
journalistic impunity since the newspaper abolished
(http://fair.org/home/killing-the-public-editor-nyt-deals-another-blow-to-th
e-publics-trust/) its 14-year-old ombudsperson position of "public editor"
more than two weeks ago-further insulating its reporters and editors from
accountability. More than ever, calling the shots at the Times-the most
influential news outlet in the United States-means never having to say
you're sorry, or even justify what you've done.
Corporate-owned media hostility toward Sanders and the progressive base has
been conspicuous and well-documented. That hostility started early
(https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/09/09/has-the-times-dismissed-b
ernie-sanders/?_r=0) in his campaign and never let up, sometimes manifested
as giving him scant coverage
(http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/Decoder/2015/1214/Should-Bernie-Sande
rs-get-as-much-media-coverage-as-Donald-Trump) . When the momentum of the
Bernie campaign gained powerful traction as a threat to the corporate order,
big media efforts to trash him went over the top.
At a key political moment last year, as FAIR analyst Adam Johnson wrote
(http://fair.org/home/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-on-bernie-sand
ers-in-16-hours/) , "the Washington Post ran 16 negative stories on Bernie
Sanders in 16 hours, between roughly 10:20 PM EST Sunday, March 6, to 3:54
PM EST Monday, March 7-a window that includes the crucial Democratic debate
in Flint, Michigan, and the next morning's spin." The day after this
onslaught, Sanders stunned the elite pundit class by winning the Michigan
primary.
Now, in mid-2017, with no presidential election in sight, why is the
corporate media hostility toward Sanders so prone to surface?
Consider, as an example, this structural reality: Jeff Bezos, the owner of
the Washington Post, has just unveiled plans for his company Amazon to buy
Whole Foods. And Bernie Sanders, the most popular politician
(http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/329404-poll-bernie-sanders-countrys-mo
st-popular-active-politician) in the United States according to polls, is
strongly opposed to allowing such huge consolidations of corporate power.
For good reasons, media powerhouses like the New York Times and Washington
Post are averse to Donald Trump. At the same time, they remain quite cozy
with Hillary Clinton's political orientation and especially with the sectors
of the corporate-military establishment that she represents. Like so much of
the mass media, those outlets see Sanders as dangerously anti-corporate and
way too willing to challenge Wall Street, big insurance companies, the
fossil fuel industry and the like.
On a political level, the Clinton wing of the party has been running on the
equivalent of dumpster-fire fumes since the disastrous loss in November. The
party's establishment, entwined with Wall Street and an agenda of continuous
military intervention overseas, was just barely able to shoehorn its
handpicked choice, Tom Perez, into becoming the new chair of the Democratic
National Committee.
In a classic joint interview
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/04/19/under-perez-dnc-still-resistin
g-call-name-enemy) with MSNBC two months ago, Perez and Sanders showcased
just how different their politics are. Perez mumbled platitudes, Sanders was
forthright. Perez spoke about victims of an unfair economy, but he refused
to denounce or even name their corporate victimizers-while Sanders was glad
to do so.
The U.S. media establishment often conflates "populism" of the right and
the left, as though Trump and Sanders are somehow symmetrical as
anti-establishment figures. And, as in the case of the New York Times
article that appeared hours after the GOP baseball tragedy, the Times has
sometimes jumped at the chance to draw far-fetched parallels between Trump's
violence-tinged, pseudo-populist messaging from the right and Bernie's
humane, inclusive messaging from the left.
Like it or not, the battle over the future of the Democratic
Party-including what kind of presidential nominee the party should have in
2020-is already underway. Overall, the top echelons of corporate media are
oriented toward promoting the Clinton wing while denigrating the Bernie
wing. The forces that brought us the disastrous 2016 Clinton campaign are
not about to give up.
Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group
RootsAction.org and the executive director of the Institute for Public
Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including "War Made Easy: How
Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."
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