When Propaganda Passes for Reporting:
The Case of Bernie Sanders
The Case of Bernie Sanders
“One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they’re the commissars. They have jobs as agents of propaganda, and they believe it. By and large, they’re part of the privileged elite, and share their interests and perceptions.” — Noam Chomsky
By now, the pro-establishment bias of mainstream liberal media should be of no surprise to even the least attentive readers of newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post and viewers of outlets like CNN. And there is perhaps no better indicator of this bias than the way in which these outlets have covered Bernie Sanders. When Sanders launched his “political revolution” in 2015, the establishment liberal media responded with a counterrevolution that produced constant denunciations of Sanders as everything from unelectable to sexist to racist to fanatical. This counterrevolution continues to this day.
One of the best broad analyses of how the crusade by the establishment liberal media against Sanders played out during the last presidential campaign is journalist Thomas Frank’s piece in Harper’s Magazine from late 2016. In this essay, Frank examines in detail the anti-Sanders bias of the opinion section of the Washington Post. Based on an analysis of around 200 articles published between January and May of 2016, Frank finds that,
Of the Post stories that could be said to take an obvious stand [on Sanders], the negative outnumbered the positive roughly five to one. (Opinion pieces about Hillary Clinton, by comparison, came much closer to a fifty-fifty split.)
Regarding these findings, Frank remarks,
We hear a lot these days about the dangers to speech posed by political correctness, about those insane left-wing college students who demand to be shielded from uncomfortable ideas. What I am describing here is something similar, but far more consequential. It is the machinery by which the boundaries of the Washington consensus are enforced.
The Post’s bias was on full display, for example, when it set “what has to be some kind of record,” as Adam Johnson reported in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), by publishing 16 anti-Sanders stories in just 16 hours in March of 2016. The timing was important, as the stories started running around when the Democratic debate in Michigan ended, right before the Democratic primary in Michigan (which Sanders won anyway), and at a time when the primary was still competitive and Sanders continued to close in on Clinton in national polls.
The Post’s editorial board, moreover, repeatedly slammed Sanders in incredibly dishonest ways during the 2016 race. The pinnacle of these attacks was an editorial titled “Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled campaign,” in which the Post portrayed Sanders as a fanatic who chooses to ignore reality when it “is ideologically or politically inconvenient.” The article itself was filled with fictions like the idea that Americans will oppose Sanders’s agenda — in actuality, it is overwhelmingly popular — and the claim that Sanders is not “a brave truth-teller” because he wants to implement basic social democratic reforms. These reforms, which include the cost-cutting and wildly popular policy Medicare for All, are clearly untenable in the Post’s view.
The editorial board of the New York Times at least had the decency to formally endorse Clinton in January of 2016, making its bias clear before the voting even began. In fact, the Times’s bias appears to go back all the way to 1981, when the paper ran a story headlined “Vermont Socialist Plans Mayoralty With Bias Towards Poor.”
In March 2016, Matt Taibbi, longtime journalist for Rolling Stone, examined one particularly conspicuous instance of bias in which Times editors made changes to an article after publication that altered its content from favorable towards Sanders to critical of him. Reflecting on the general state of the paper’s reporting up to that point, Taibbi noted that “the New York Times… has practically been an official mouthpiece for the Clinton campaign this election season.”
In June of 2016, the Times further solidified that position, with the editorial board publishing an article headlined “It Was Better to Bern Out” a couple days before Sanders endorsed Clinton and effectively ended his bid for the nomination. While the editorial board awards Sanders some well-deserved credit for his impressive performance in the piece, it also opines,
Mr. Sanders offered prescriptions that too often consisted of facile calls for “revolution,” for feel-good but economically unsustainable proposals for universal health care and free tuition to public colleges.
Of course, free public college would cost less than the increase in the military budget approved in 2017, and Medicare for All, Sanders’s proposal for universal healthcare, would save the American people money. The editorial’s take on Clinton, who is known to those not on the Times editorial board mostly for vague commitments to strength through unity and breaking down barriers, is that she was aided by her “command of policy minutiae” in her “pivotal win.”
Since the 2016 primary, establishment liberal outlets have persisted in their campaign against Sanders. Although this campaign has featured many themes, it’s worth focusing in on a few of the most common ones, ones that were integral to the war on Sanders in 2016 and which see continued use to this day. To that end, I’ve delineated three broad categories of establishment liberal propaganda: (1) propaganda as fact-checking; (2) propaganda as predictions; and (3) the weaponization of identity. Although these are far from the only forms of propaganda found in the mainstream liberal media, they have probably consumed, and will likely keep consuming, the most column inches and airtime.
Propaganda as Fact-Checking
There is nothing establishment liberal outlets love more than to fact-check the supremely substance-driven Sanders in an effort to make him appear amateurish and unfit for the presidency. A major incident involving this dynamic occurred in April of 2016, starting when the editorial board of the New York Daily News conducted an interview with Sanders on April 1st. The interview included a fairly technical discussion of one of Sanders’s core policies, breaking up the big banks, in which Sanders’s answers came off as vague to some.
In reality, Sanders’s responses did not even constitute a minor slip up. As Wall Street expert Mike Konczal noted following the interview, “Sanders has a clear path on how he wants to break up the banks, which he described” in the interview, adding, “If anything, Sanders is too wonky.”
Nevertheless, as reporter Max Ehrenfreund wrote in the Washington Post,
Writers for The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, CNN, Slate and Talking Points Memo as well as The Washington Post concluded that Sanders had botched the interview, and that he wasn’t prepared to answer important practical and logistical questions about his policies.
Further, they questioned Sanders’s understanding of the facts.
Ehrenfreund’s article — one of the few relatively favorable articles about Sanders in the Post — was titled “Why Bernie Sanders knows more about big banks than his critics are saying” and took a nuanced look at Sanders’s interview. In it, Ehrenfreund basically exonerates Sanders on any charges of skewing facts and lacking knowledge of the banking system.
Others, including economist Dean Baker and journalists Ryan Grim and Peter Eavis, likewise defended Sanders. In an interview nearly two weeks after Sanders’s Daily News interview, for instance, Baker observed that the Daily News “editorial board seemed to view its job as trying to embarrass Sanders rather than elicit his views on important issues.” He compared Sanders’s interview to Clinton’s Daily News interview, saying of the first answer Clinton gave in her interview, “If the media treated Clinton in the same way as Sanders, she would be a national laughing stock for [that] answer. But in all probability no one will pay attention.” And to drive his point home, Baker remarked: “Most of the media really hate a candidate like Sanders who actually does want to challenge the status quo. They are not going to play fair and this was an excellent example that demonstrates the point.”
Despite the articles debunking them, the anti-Sanders hit-jobs gave Clinton plenty to capitalize on, no matter how dishonestly, which she quickly did in an opening shot of her new strategy of going negative on Sanders. As CNN detailed regarding this change in tactics:
A Clinton campaign fundraising appeal after the Wisconsin primary offered a glimpse into the new approach. The campaign’s deputy communications director, Christina Reynolds, argued that Sanders is unqualified, sending a full transcript of a New York Daily News editorial board interview of Sanders.
Asked April 6th whether Sanders was qualified to be president on MSNBC, Clinton questioned Sanders’s qualifications but would not give a direct yes-or-no answer.
It’s useful to compare Clinton’s words to Sanders’s when each candidate was asked to judge the traits of the other. When asked about Sanders’s qualifications on MSNBC, Clinton said,
I think he hadn’t done his homework, and he’d been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions.
Sanders, meanwhile, in the very interview Clinton was using to question his qualifications, responded to a question about her trustworthiness in the following way:
I have not attacked her personally. I will let the American people make a determination about her trustworthiness. That is not an area that I’m comfortable.
However, frustrated by assertions about his qualifications from Clinton’s campaign, Sanders hit back after Clinton’s MSNBC interview by questioning the qualifications of a candidate with a record like Clinton’s. In doing so, Sanders was offering policy critiques, many of which he had been making for months, but was not actually scrutinizing Clinton’s experience.
Nevertheless, he was immediately crucified for smearing Clinton on Twitter and in articles run in the Huffington Post and the New York Times. A story published by NBC depicted Sanders as the aggressor, opening with:
The gloves are truly off between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.
Less than 24 hours after Sanders’ big win in Wisconsin, the senator from Vermont hammered Clinton for not being “qualified” to be president.
Glenn Kessler, resident fact-checker for the Washington Post, also joined in. He criticized Sanders for claiming “that Clinton called him ‘not qualified’ for the presidency,” giving Sanders three Pinocchios for this claim. PolitiFact nodded in agreement.
Though it is true that Sanders’s statement that Clinton “thinks that I am, quote unquote not qualified to be president” is wrong because of its inclusion of the words “quote unquote,” it’s debatable how much that matters given Clinton had questioned Sanders’s qualifications and her campaign had directly smeared Sanders as unqualified. Regarding Clinton’s answers on MSNBC, even Kessler admitted,
Those kinds of answers certainly give license to reporters to offer an interpretation that Clinton is raising questions about her rival’s qualifications. Clinton, after all, is a former secretary of state and is adept at signaling messages without actually saying the words out loud.
With that being the case, it’s strange that Kessler decided to trash Sanders in his column rather than point out that while Sanders misspoke when trying to emphasize the fact that Clinton questioned his qualifications, his general message was accurate.
What makes the situation even more absurd is that the Post had run an article on April 6th headlined “Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president.” Sanders’s campaign had cited that April 6th Post headline along with the CNN article discussing Clinton’s change in strategy to support Sanders’s remarks that Clinton had called him unqualified. But, as Robin Andersen noted in FAIR, while the Post disparaged Sanders, it “gave itself no pinocchios for” its April 6th headline, and Kessler waved away the CNN article as irrelevant.
Sanders himself clarified his comments on April 7th, maintaining, “[I]f Secretary Clinton thinks… they’re gonna beat us up and they’re gonna go after us in some kind of really uncalled for way that we’re not gonna fight back… they can guess again.” If he was merely responding to Clinton’s original attack, why was he cast by so many in the establishment media as the instigator, with Clinton portrayed as the innocent victim?
Since this episode in April 2016, the establishment liberal media has made publishing anti-Sanders propaganda disguised as fact-checking something of a hobby. For instance, in January 2017, Kessler published another fact-check of a Sanders statement in the Post, this time awarding Sanders four Pinocchios for his “claim that ‘36,000 people will die yearly’ if Obamacare is repealed.” Kessler’s fact-check was soon debunked in the Post itself, with two professors of public health — David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler — writing, “The frightening fact is that Sanders’s estimate that about 36,000 people will die if the ACA is repealed is consistent with well-respected studies.”
In a different case, after the Koch-funded Mercatus Center released a report on Sanders’s Medicare for All plan in July of 2018, perceptive journalists recognized that the report, which had been released with the intention of harming the standing of Medicare for All, actually found that Sanders’s plan would save the American people about $2 trillion over a decade. Sanders proceeded to post a video on Twitter in which he said, “Let me thank the Koch brothers of all people for sponsoring a study that shows that Medicare for All would save the American people $2 trillion over a 10-year period.”
Establishment outlets reprimanded Sanders for his claim. In the Post, Kessler gave Sanders’s statement three Pinocchios, a rating that still stands despite the fact that Kessler’s original article “had three serious factual errors in it that he later had to correct,” according to analyst Matt Bruenig.
For CNN, Jake Tapper released a video in which he judged Sanders’s claim to be false, but after being criticized relentlessly Tapper “conceded the video is wrong and promised that it will be corrected soon.” He nevertheless lied once again in his updated video, which is still up on YouTube:
The central fall-back claim that Tapper and Kessler ended up using to justify their criticism of Sanders’s statement was that the savings of Medicare for All only hold if the assumptions of Sanders’s plan are correct. They pointed to other numbers that the Mercatus Center study came up with when different assumptions were made.
Yet, as Bruenig wrote regarding those assumptions Sanders’s plan supposedly makes:
the provider payment rates are not assumptions; rather, they are written into the law itself. If Sanders says he is going to use Medicare reimbursement rates to pay providers, then that is what he is going to use. Any score that replaces those rates with some other set of rates is straightforwardly not a score of Sanders’s plan. End of discussion.
Sanders, then, was absolutely correct to tout the Mercatus study as proof that his Medicare for All plan would save the public money. Kessler and Tapper, even in their updated fact-checks, were dead wrong.
The most recent incident of propaganda as fact-checking occurred when Kessler again decided to challenge Sanders, now on his claim that Wall Street got a trillion dollar bailout during the Great Recession. Kessler doled out two Pinocchios to Sanders for his claim. Not even a day after Kessler’s piece went online, Matt Taibbi, who diligently covered the financial crash, tore it to shreds in Rolling Stone.
Taibbi observes that Kessler’s rosy picture of the Wall Street bailout basically repeats in more words “Wall Street’s one-sentence summary of the bailouts: they weren’t that big, but if they were, they were necessary, and made a profit, and even though they made us rich again, they were done for you, the ordinary person!” Taibbi criticizes Kessler for his heavy focus on the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), as that “was really a minor appetizer on the bailout menu,” and maintains that we must factor in things Kessler did not, such as “the 2008 ban on short-selling of 799 financial stocks” and “the emergency bank charters handed out to Goldman and Morgan Stanley.” These few paragraphs provide the core of Taibbi’s critique:
Beyond all of [the] gifts, which are difficult to quantify, Kessler has his numbers confused. Even he cites the $1 trillion figure for emergency Fed loans offered by the GAO [Government Accountability Office]. [Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben] Bernanke put the peak-lending figure at $1.5 trillion. Why don’t these numbers by themselves justify the statement, ‘They got a trillion dollar bailout’?
The Special Inspector General’s office for the TARP program [SIGTARP], meanwhile, issued reports for the bailout. This oversight panel led by Bailout author and former SIGTARP chief Neil Barofsky put the gross outlay — including the TARP, and other Treasury and Fed expenditures — at $4.6 trillion. The net outlay they place at $3.3 trillion. Why are these numbers less reliable than the rest?
As I’ve written before, trying to compute the bailout is a fool’s errand, because it was so all-encompassing. The government’s massive treasure dump into the balance sheets of the top banks was a kind of merger, one that obligated us to keep our investments viable going forward though a range of complementary actions.
Those included regulatory relief, inflated asset purchases, market intervention, tax breaks and other actions. God knows how much all of that was worth, but the cash portion of it alone was certainly north of a trillion dollars, when you figure in both TARP and the Fed lending.
Dean Baker reached a similar conclusion to Taibbi in an article published the next day. The subtitle of his article reads: “The [Post’s] fact-checker might need to work on his own understanding of the facts, because Sanders seems on pretty solid ground here.”
Propaganda as Predictions
A second prevalent media trick is to portray Sanders as unelectable, a depiction that justified the utter lack of coverage of Sanders in 2016 and that today is used to undermine Sanders’s renewed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Two reports by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center reveal the way this media strategy worked in 2016. Looking at non-opinion reporting done by eight major print and online news outlets throughout the 2016 primary season, researchers found the Democratic race received far less coverage than the Republican race, with Sanders being particularly ill-covered. In 2015, Sanders ended up with less coverage than a full five Republican candidates and one-third the coverage of Clinton. And in 2016, Sanders’s coverage was two-thirds Clinton’s coverage, less than half Donald Trump’s, and even below Ted Cruz’s.
Perhaps above all, 2016 primary coverage for both Republicans and Democrats was overwhelmingly focused on the horse race, with outlets obsessing over polling and primary results. “Substantive concerns” made up just 11% of total coverage. In the Democratic horse race, the media portrayed Clinton as the electable candidate while Sanders’s campaign was seen as a long shot and then a lost cause.
The horse race-framed narrative of Sanders is well-embodied in a New York Times article from February 2016. The article, titled “Delegate Count Leaving Bernie Sanders With Steep Climb,” reflected on the state of the race following the first three primary contests. The opening paragraph is followed by these crucial sentences:
[T]he often overlooked delegate count in the Democratic primary shows Mr. Sanders slipping significantly behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the nomination, and the odds of his overtaking her growing increasingly remote.
Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate.
The real disparity between Clinton and Sanders was found in superdelegates, whose votes are not finalized until the end of the primary, and who favored Clinton to Sanders at this point 451 to 19. In terms of pledged delegates, however, Sanders and Clinton were tied at 51, as the Times admitted in passing further into the article. In 2008, the Times had defaulted to only counting pledged delegates when it talked about the delegate count. Not so when an anti-establishment figure challenged its preferred candidate in 2016.
CNN also counted superdelegates together with pledged delegates when reporting on delegate counts throughout the 2016 primary season. CNN host Brian Stelter staunchly defended his outlet’s decision to do so in early June 2016 in a debate with Cenk Uygur, host of the progressive media network the Young Turks. Uygur rightfully lambasted Stelter, and CNN as a whole, for “journalistic malpractice.”
It’s hard to judge the precise impact of this marginalization and slanted portrayal of Sanders in 2016. A psychological phenomenon known as the bandwagon effect, “in which people do something primarily because other people are doing it, regardless of their own beliefs,” was certainly at play, though the number of voters who succumbed to it is unknown.
Sanders this time around is a much more formidable force. While he was polling in the single digits as he entered the 2016 primary, he joined the 2020 race after consistently polling above all other candidates except Joe Biden. Sanders’s increased stature makes him an even starker threat than before to the liberal establishment, making it imperative for that establishment to fabricate an image of Sanders as unelectable once again.
Let’s get the case for Sanders’s electability in the 2020 primary out of the way before examining the establishment media’s counternarrative. First, since 2016, Sanders has repeatedly polled as the most popular elected official in the country. Second, the majority of the American people are with Sanders, often by large margins, on the central planks of his platform. Third, Sanders is a seasoned debater who knows how to advocate effectively for his policy beliefs. Fourth, he has a clear policy agenda of his own and a decades-long record to back it up, perhaps a unique combination in the current field. And fifth, to this point, Sanders has polled second for the 2020 Democratic nomination in every national poll available on Real Clear Politics, which go back to October of 2018, except for three, one of which placed him tied for first and another of which put him firmly in first.
Since announcing, Sanders’s fortitude has only become more evident. He raised $5.9 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign from over 220,000 donors, putting his average donation at roughly $27. Within a week, over one million volunteers had signed up for his campaign. No other candidate can match this grassroots support (see my analysis of Beto O’Rourke in the context of his fundraising figures here).
Nevertheless, Chris Cillizza and Harry Enten, who make CNN’s 2020 predictions, have taken full advantage of the opportunity to shaft Sanders in almost all of their top ten rankings of Democrats likely to win the nomination. Cillizza and Enten have compiled ranked lists of Democratic contenders since July of last year, with a total of ten lists so far. Through March of this year, they put Sanders outside of the top four on every list except for the March one, on which Sanders is third. Joe Biden snagged the top spot on the first two lists, Elizabeth Warren got it on the next two, and Kamala Harris sat atop each of the next five lists.
For a sense of their reasoning for ranking Harris so high, read the paragraph on her from their January ranking:
When you’re trying to think of who will win the nomination, you have a look at a checklist of attributes that play well within today’s Democratic Party. The junior senator from California pretty much checks all of them. Progressive? Check. Woman? Check. Black? Check. Can take it to Trump? She’s the former attorney general of California. Still, Harris is well back in the early polls, which keeps us from going all in on her.
Of course, Harris is not a progressive, and it’s confusing why her polling should not carry much weight. What Cillizza and Enten’s argument boils down to is this: Kamala Harris will win because she is a black, female former attorney general. What they leave unsaid, and what probably has more to do with their ranking than anything explicitly written, is that Harris is an establishment favorite.
Besides this paragraph on Harris, the best example of how devoid of substance and reason these rankings are is Cillizza’s video on Sanders, released a couple of days after Sanders announced his candidacy, in which Cillizza details “[w]hy 2020 will be harder for Bernie Sanders,” a strange pronouncement given all the factors stacked against Sanders in 2016.
Cillizza provides three arguments to support his claim that Sanders faces a tougher path to the nomination now than he did in 2016: (1) more candidates are vying for the progressive vote; (2) “the Democratic party is getting less white, younger, and more female”; and (3) “Bernie Sanders isn’t technically speaking a Democrat at all.” It’s easy to refute these arguments, as progressive talk show host Kyle Kulinski did in a response video.
First, among actually progressive candidates, only Elizabeth Warren is polling well enough to cut into Sanders’s vote share much, and there are far more establishment candidates running who will split the establishment vote among themselves. Second, Sanders’s favorability numbers are highest among young people and minorities. Third, Cillizza himself cited a poll at the start of the video showing fewer than 20% of Democrats have an unfavorable opinion of Sanders, so the fact that Sanders is not a Democrat doesn’t seem to mean much. In fact, there is a case to be made — and one that has been made rather forcefully — that Sanders’s identification as an independent actually helps him since it further bolsters his anti-establishment credentials.
In contrast to CNN, the Washington Post has had a better record of fairness in its election rankings. Post reporter Aaron Blake ranked Sanders first on his first four lists of likely 2020 Democratic nominees, second on his next two, and first on his latest one. The Post did start out by trashing Sanders in its power rankings of Democrats that have the best chance against Trump. However, Sanders has made the top three in those rankings for the last few weeks and even reached number one on the latest list. Thus, at least in the area of predictions, there is one mainstream outlet that stands above the rest, although this hardly makes up for the Post’s bias in other areas.
CNN’s propaganda regarding opinion polling and election prospects did not slow down in the month or so after Sanders’s campaign launch. On March 20th, Enten published an article titled “Polls show Bernie Sanders popularity among all voters is plummeting.” As Kyle Kulinski pointed out regarding the main poll cited in Enten’s piece, “the sample size was only 32% Democrat and Dem-leaning independents” even though 47% of the country identified as a member of one of those categories in a March survey. Further, the poll “way oversampled older voters,” who disproportionately oppose Sanders.
Ironically, CNN happened to run this article on the same day that another poll came out showing Sanders tied for the lead in the Democratic primary for the first time. Additionally, the same poll CNN used to make the argument that Sanders’s support is plummeting found that Sanders’s support among potential Democratic primary voters had jumped up from December 2018. While Sanders had 14% support in December, he received 20% in March. The only other candidate with a similar jump was Kamala Harris, who went from 4% support in December to 12% in March.
Given that Sanders polled at 13% and Harris polled at 9% in October of 2018, it is certainly debatable whose rise in the polls has been more impressive. Not to CNN though. While it used the polling data to cast doubt on Sanders’s support, it used the data to play up Harris’s rise, running on March 19th an article titled “CNN Poll: Harris climbs in the Democratic race, as enthusiasm starts high for both parties.”
To be fair to CNN, Jake Tapper did more recently recognize Sanders as the front-runner for 2020, commenting about Sanders, “You can’t even deny it. He is the Democratic presidential front-runner of declared candidates.” More surprisingly, Enten published a piece on April 3rd titled “Bernie Sanders’ fundraising is just the latest sign of his top-tier status,” which begins,
Make no mistake: There is a clear path to the Democratic presidential nomination for Sen. Bernie Sanders. His strong fundraising numbers are just the latest sign that Sanders 2.0 has a better shot of succeeding than his first bid in 2016.
The article is worth reading in its entirety not least because it directly contradicts Cillizza’s arguments from a little over a month before, although it understandably never calls out Cillizza by name. It is one of the most objective and holistic looks at Sanders’s chances published thus far, and a much more in-depth case for Sanders’s electability than my pitch above.
Even more recently, on April 11th, Enten and Cillizza published a new set of rankings of Democrats most likely to win the 2020 primary with Sanders tied with Biden for the lead. Though the article, titled “‘Mayor Pete’ surges into the top 10 in our 2020 rankings,” was heavily focused on Pete Buttigieg, its placement of Sanders with Biden at the front of the pack represented a major shift from previous coverage and seemed to reflect a recognition of the futility of denying Sanders’s strength. Nevertheless, CNN’s coverage of Sanders generally sharply contrasts with its coverage of establishment candidates, with these candidates portrayed much more favorably than Sanders.
This disparity in coverage between Sanders and establishment favorites is replicated in the New York Times. Upon Sanders’s announcement, for example, the Times ran an article titled “Bernie Sanders, Once the Progressive Outlier, Joins a Crowded Presidential Field.” The title of its article reporting Harris’s campaign launch was “Kamala Harris Declares Candidacy, Evoking King and Joining Diverse Field.” Headlines for Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker after their campaign announcements were “Beto O’Rourke, Praising Immigration, Kicks Off Presidential Campaign in El Paso” and “Cory Booker Announces Presidential Bid, Joining Most Diverse Field Ever.” Only around four in ten people read past headlines, so the effect of these slanted titles is obvious, and the intent is similarly clear.
Such skewed articles are far from alone in the Times’s pages, joined by other anti-Sanders stories like a December 2018 one titled “For Bernie Sanders, Holding Onto Support May Be Hard in a 2020 Bid.” Here’s the first paragraph:
Some of his top congressional supporters won’t commit to backing him if he runs for president again — and two may join the 2020 race themselves. A handful of former aides might work for other candidates. And Bernie Sanders’s initial standing in Iowa polls is well below the 49.6 percent he captured in nearly defeating Hillary Clinton there in 2016.
This list of obstacles the Sanders campaign faces seems steep, until you realize that nothing throughout the paragraph holds any significance. The first two sentences describe what could happen on any presidential campaign, popular or not, especially so early in the primary. And the last sentence apparently banks on duping the reader into believing a comparison of polling between a field with two serious candidates and a field with at least five is in some way meaningful.
A similar propaganda strategy appeared in a more recent Times article, this one titled “‘Stop Sanders’ Democrats Are Agonizing Over His Momentum.” The piece as a whole is a worthwhile look into establishment Democrats’ discontent with Sanders and how these Democrats are planning to thwart Sanders’s rise. However, seemingly in an attempt not to be too objective, the Times added this paragraph:
The good news for Mr. Sanders’s foes is that his polling is down significantly in early-nominating states from 2016, he is viewed more negatively among Democrats than many of his top rivals, and he has already publicly vowed to support the party’s nominee if he falls short.
Again, the first point, that Sanders is polling worse now, with many competitors, than he performed in 2016 in early primary states, is irrelevant. The second point, that “he is viewed more negatively among Democrats than many of his top rivals,” can be countered with the fact that he is viewed more positively among Democrats than many of his top rivals, which is equally true. For example, based on YouGov numbers from March, Sanders has a 73% positive and 19% negative favorability rating among Democrats. With 77% positive, only Joe Biden has higher favorability than Sanders, and the next highest favorability rating after Biden and Sanders is 63% positive, held by both Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris. The Times may prefer to leave out this information, but if it were objective it wouldn’t.
As another example of bias in the Times, we can go all the way back to a November 2018 article which plays on an establishment strategy outlined by journalist and Sanders speechwriter David Sirota in the tweet below:
The article’s headline reads: “Bernie Sanders: Lion of the Left, but Not the Only One Roaring.” Its main argument is that Sanders may have trouble maintaining support since so many other Democratic candidates are courting his progressive base. The author, Sydney Ember, writes: “Outflanked on the left by rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Beto O’Rourke, [Sanders’s] stronghold on the party’s progressive wing has weakened.” Neither Ocasio-Cortez nor Pressley is running for president, and while O’Rourke is running for president, he is not a progressive. Thus, for Ember to consider her take an intelligent one is telling.
The article ends by quoting an Iowan who
had caucused for Mr. Sanders in 2016, but… said he now thought it was “time for a fresher face in Democratic leadership.” For 2020, he had his eye on Ms. Harris and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York[.]
“In this day and age, people like to see things that are different,” he said later. “Status quo stuff kind of doesn’t stick.”
Sanders, then, is the new “status quo,” while establishment Democrats like Harris and Gillibrand are the fresh-faced progressive champions.
It’s important to recognize that practically all of the articles critiqued in this section are not from opinion sections. Rather, they are run as analysis and news stories that purportedly look objectively at the state of the Democratic primary. Yet a clear anti-Sanders and pro-establishment bias is easily detectable.
The Weaponization of Identity
A third tactic of the media is to weaponize identity against Sanders. Many sources referenced thus far demonstrate this strategy to some extent — a common theme in the establishment media is the use of various attacks within the same piece — and it’s worth thinking of the strategy within the framework of a broader backlash by the establishment against Sanders.
Glenn Greenwald, journalist and co-founder of the Intercept, elucidated such a framework in a January 2016 article comparing the backlash against Sanders in the U.S. to the backlash against Jeremy Corbyn in the U.K. In his piece, Greenwald outlines seven stages of backlash, the fourth of which is:
Smear the candidate and his supporters with innuendos of sexism and racism by falsely claiming only white men support them (you like this candidate because he’s white and male like you, not because of ideology or policy or contempt for the party establishment’s corporatist, pro-war approach).
With regard to racism, the smears against Sanders in 2016 and since have been absurd in the context of his history on racial issues. As journalist, activist, and Sanders supporter Shaun King relays, Sanders took part in civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, marching with Martin Luther King, Jr. and getting arrested for protesting segregation while a college student. He has a long history of fighting for civil rights and, although he did unfortunately vote for the 1994 crime bill, he voted for it because legislation like the Violence Against Women Act was attached to it. He opposed the racist and pro-incarceration measures in the bill, with his urging that we look at the root causes of crime rather than simply locking people up standing in sharp contrast to the racist and pro-incarceration arguments put forth by establishment favorite Joe Biden at the time.
For Sanders to be attacked so relentlessly on racial issues in 2016 while Clinton was exempted from much harsh criticism — after all, she was winning the black vote — was astonishing given Clinton’s own history on racial issues. For example, with her campaign doing things like circulating a photo of Barack Obama in African garb, Clinton used blatantly racist smears against Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary. Further, as scholar and author of The New Jim Crow Michelle Alexander put it in the subtitle of an article from the 2016 primary season, “From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted — and Hillary Clinton supported — decimated black America.” Discussing Clinton’s role in accelerating mass incarceration in the 1990s, Alexander pointed out that Clinton had “used racially coded rhetoric to cast black children as animals” at the time.
The reality with regard to sexism is similar. As Greenwald notes later in his piece on the establishment backlash,
the crass, cynical exploitation of gender issues by Clinton supporters to imply Sanders support is grounded in sexism was particularly slimy and dishonest given that the same left-wing factions that support Sanders spent months literally pleading with Elizabeth Warren to challenge Clinton, to say nothing of the large numbers of female Sanders supporters whose existence was nullified by those attacks.
Sanders himself is a self-declared feminist with a strong history of fighting for women’s rights. He has a 100% perfect voting record from Planned Parenthood on women’s health and rights. The details of Sanders’s record are outlined on FeelTheBern.org, a site dedicated to documenting Sanders’s positions and history. As the site recounts, Sanders co-sponsored legislation in the early 1990s “to bar states from restricting the right to terminate a pregnancy before fetal viability or at any time when a termination is necessary to protect the health of a woman.” He “voted, in August of 1994, for the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which authorized $1.6 billion towards investigating and prosecuting violent crimes against women, and created the Office on Violence Against Women.” And in the early 2000s, he “co-sponsored a constitutional amendment that would guarantee fair treatment and employment of women.”
Shortly after publishing his article on the stages of establishment backlash, Greenwald published another article with greater focus on the supposed sexism of Sanders and his supporters. In it, he dissects the “Bernie bro” narrative, which was an integral part of stage four of the establishment backlash as he had presented it.
Greenwald writes that the “Bernie bro” narrative is
intended to imply two equally false claims: (1) a refusal to march enthusiastically behind the Wall Street-enriched, multiple-war-advocating, despot-embracing Hillary Clinton is explainable not by ideology or political conviction, but largely if not exclusively by sexism: demonstrated by the fact that men, not women, support Sanders (his supporters are “bros”); and (2) Sanders supporters are uniquely abusive and misogynistic in their online behavior.
This “Bernie bro” narrative melded with accusations of blindness to racial issues to produce a grand narrative for the establishment media. The grand narrative paints Sanders as a politician oblivious to racial and gender issues, potentially even racist and sexist, with a fan base made up to a highly disproportionate extent of aggressive white men.
In reality, however, Sanders had then and has now massive support from women and minorities, particularly young ones — age turns out to be a far more meaningful predictor of support for Sanders than race or gender. Moreover, Sanders supporters are probably less belligerent and rude than supporters of other candidates — one survey, for instance, found Sanders supporters to have been far less guilty of online harassment in 2016 than Clinton supporters.
As Greenwald comments when discussing the outcries over aggressive Sanders supporters, Clinton supporters, who are found in much higher numbers than Sanders supporters in the mainstream media, simply projected their own experiences of being harshly criticized by Sanders supporters onto the political landscape as a whole. Greenwald remarks,
[I]f you really think that Sanders supporters are particularly abusive online, that says a great deal about which candidate you want to win, and nothing about Sanders supporters.
The grand anti-Sanders narrative has appeared frequently in coverage of Sanders since 2016, remaining a favorite smear device of the establishment, which seems to have judged it effective at blunting Sanders’s rise. His failure to capture the black vote in 2016, for instance, is a common topic, often included as one point among many in articles skeptical about Sanders’s chances in 2020.
Over the past few months, mainstream outlets have published a smattering of articles dedicated to specifically assessing Sanders’s struggle to gain black support, including “Bernie Sanders Stumbled With Black Voters in 2016. Can He Do Better in 2020?” from the New York Times; “Bernie Sanders struggled to win black voters. It could be even more difficult in 2020.” from the Washington Post; and “Sanders’ evolution on race may not have come soon enough” from CNN. A particularly mind-numbing headline was “Sen. Bernie Sanders changes his message to black voters: ‘Racism is alive,’” published this January in the Washington Post, with the obvious implication being that Sanders had not directly addressed racism in 2016, a blatant lie.
Some outlets seem to have realized that their attacks on Sanders on the issue of race are becoming more difficult to maintain as polls come out showing his support among black voters growing stronger and stronger. For example, in his CNN article included in the previous section, Harry Enten comments,
Sanders is holding his own with black voters. He’s winning about 20% of them in a far more divided field than 2016. Importantly, this is the about the same amount of support he is winning from Democratic voters overall. As FiveThirtyEight’s Perry Bacon points out, there isn’t a difference in Sanders’ support by race.
Yet, on April 5th, the Washington Post published yet another article furthering the grand anti-Sanders narrative. The third paragraph reads:
The rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), ex-congressman Beto O’Rourke and former vice president Joe Biden in a field with historic diversity has caused dismay among some Democrats, particularly African Americans and women hoping for a mold-breaking nominee who reflects the changing face of the party and the country.
Sanders’s failure to capture the black vote in 2016 is mentioned three times in the article, and his invocation of Barack Obama during a speech is implied to be strange since “he shares little ideology” with Obama. A quote from former attorney general Eric Holder allows the Post to lump Sanders in with O’Rourke and Biden as part of a “‘traditional’ set” of candidates. Other than to say that Biden has been leading, polls go unmentioned. The fact that Sanders would be the first Jewish president, which would seem relevant to a discussion of diversity, is similarly left out, another commonality in mainstream coverage.
Most recently, on April 20th, the New York Times published perhaps the most blatant non-editorial attack on Sanders yet. The article’s headline reads “Should a White Man Be the Face of the Democratic Party in 2020?” and the cover photo is of Sanders. After an intro paragraph come these two paragraphs:
Mr. Johnson, a 27-year-old law student, said the large field was a great equalizer, and “if at the end of it we get an old white guy, someone who represents the status quo, it’ll be because they’ve proven themselves.”
Ms. Neal, a dental hygienist, made an agonized face at Mr. Johnson, her boyfriend. Wouldn’t something be lost, she asked, if the historically diverse slate of 2020 Democrats was passed over?
Further down, the Times makes its message perfectly clear:
Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders are starting off with other advantages as well: They are the best-known candidates at this stage, both with experience running for president, and they are well positioned to have the money and resources to compete through the 2020 primaries.
But as older white men, they are out of step with ascendant forces in the party today.
Women, minorities and young people are fueling much of its energy, and they are well represented by multiple well-qualified, politically savvy female and nonwhite Democrats who are running. Ms. Harris in particular has had a strong start in fund-raising, and only Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders consistently outpace her in polls.
Of course, the ascendant players in the Democratic party are not only minorities and women but strong progressives. Rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ro Khanna, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Pramila Jayapal all align themselves with Sanders. Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, decided to run after working on Sanders’s 2016 campaign and then being approached by Justice Democrats, a progressive organization partly inspired by Sanders. However, it would only make sense to include the fact that Sanders’s campaign in 2016 spurred the transformation of the Democratic party into a more diverse and more progressive party if the Times were an objective outlet.
The Times conducted interviews with potential Democratic voters for the April 20th piece, and, while the article does mention Sanders’s strength in terms of fundraising and polling, that he had support among the people interviewed is played down. Unsurprisingly, his Jewish heritage goes unmentioned. For the Times, having a Jewish president who lost relatives in the Holocaust apparently would not constitute a win for diversity (at least not one worth much), maybe because diversity only matters to the Times when it can be cynically weaponized against political adversaries.
The Times also happens to have been the outlet behind the major reintroduction this election cycle of the allegations of sexism implied by the “Bernie bro” narrative. In January of this year, the paper ran an investigative piece titled “Sexism Claims From Bernie Sanders’s 2016 Run: Paid Less, Treated Worse,” which amounted to an addition to a flimsy, and ultimately baseless, case meant to indict Sanders as sexist. The original article title was “For Bernie Sanders, Claims of Sexism in 2016 Campaign Hang Over 2020 Bid,” and the paper’s companion tweet for the article reads, “Women who worked for the Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 say complaints of sexism and mistreatment were not addressed. It could hinder a 2020 bid.”
As the Times mentions in passing in the piece, Sanders was not even aware of the claims of harassment that went unaddressed. He did not, for example, decide to protect one of his top advisers after the adviser was accused of sexual harassment, like Hillary Clinton did. Furthermore, Sanders has responded well to the issue, apologizing and instituting serious reforms in both his 2018 Senate campaign and his 2020 presidential campaign.
Kyle Kulinski addressed the Times’s claims at length shortly after the piece was published. As he points out, the Times’s framing of the issue gives everything away. The article does not frame the problems in Sanders’s 2016 campaign as part of a larger societal issue that is bound to show up in a quickly assembled campaign. Rather, it uses the claims of discrimination to question the viability of a Sanders 2020 bid and to further the “Bernie bro” narrative. That the Times decided to use such dishonest framing reveals the article for what it is: a hit piece designed to bolster a false narrative and tank Sanders. That the information from this piece has been featured endlessly in the coverage of Sanders and his chances since January confirms this point.
There are undoubtedly fair grounds for critiquing Sanders on race and gender — such as the fact that he did not make race as central to his message as he should have in 2016 and that he voted along with other 2020 contenders for SESTA/FOSTA, a law that has harmed sex workers and may have even led to an increase in sex trafficking, which it was meant to curb. But the pervasive narrative that he has massive blind spots on race and gender, reflected by his monolithically white and male base of support, is simply incorrect. Nevertheless, the establishment liberal media continues to peddle this grand narrative in their supposedly objective reporting and analysis.
The categories outlined in this article and the examples of bias they contain are far from the only categories or examples that capture the establishment media’s bias against Sanders, and we will see only more slanted coverage of Sanders from marginally liberal mainstream outlets as the 2020 race ramps up. I have not even mentioned that Democratic party operatives who questioned Sanders during his recent CNN town hall did not disclose their party ties. Nor have I scrutinized the ubiquitous pro-establishment framing of questions by mainstream journalists, the lack of left-wing (and pro-Sanders) voices on Sunday news shows, the attempts to portray Sanders as a product of the Kremlin, or the recent smears against Sanders team members. For a deeper account of the media’s anti-Sanders bias, I recommend combing through FAIR’s dozens of articles documenting it and following the progressive journalists and commentators named throughout this piece.
What I have been describing is a protracted war being waged by an elite liberal class that dominates much of the mainstream media in this country. This war is only a small part of a much broader civil war underway in the Democratic party, which sees progressives such as Sanders pitted against an establishment that backed Clinton in 2016. The media’s propaganda efforts function, as in any war, as a way to confuse, deflect, and distract the general population, as well as to smear and discredit opponents. As long as we recognize the distortions and can call out the propaganda, however, Sanders and the rest of the progressive left stand a fighting chance.