Thanks, I'm adding it to my growing lists of books to read.
Carl Jarvis
On 11/21/19, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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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