Does the Media have a Vendetta Against Bernie Sanders?

“Bernie Sanders has emerged as the Donald Trump of the Left”
“Are Democrats going to let Bernie Sanders get away with this?”
“The threat of Bernie Sanders”

These are just three out of dozens of recent Washington Post articles written about Bernie Sanders, all similarly portraying Sanders as an unpopular and untrustworthy candidate on the left. Examples like these are leading many Sanders supporters to question whether mainstream media publications are intentionally painting Sanders in a negative light. According to the New York Times, in every hundred opinion pieces by the Washington Post during the 2016 primary season, there were five negative opinion pieces written about Sanders for every positive piece written about him. Meanwhile, there were only two negative pieces about Hillary Clinton for every positive one. Sanders himself has pointed out that the Washington Post overwhelmingly tends to publish negative articles about his campaign, attributing these sentiments to his harsh critique of the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Said Sanders of Amazon, “We have pointed out over and over again that Amazon made $10 billion in profits last year. You know how much they paid in taxes? You got it, zero!” concluding, “Any wonder why the Washington Post is not one of my great supporters?” 

Bernie’s fiery statements about the Washington Post may seem harsh at first glance, but they have a basis in reality. For example, while the Washington Post states that “Jeff Bezos allows [its] newsroom to operate with full independence…”, certain articles, such as those indicating that Sanders’s student loan forgiveness program is a “bailout for rich kids,” or those that blow a disagreement among Sanders’s campaign staff wildly out of proportion, have raised the eyebrows of many Sanders supporters. A moderator at a Washington Post event even cherry-picked part of a 1974 quote from Sanders regarding governmental busing policies, describing them as “well meaning in theory but sometimes result[ing] in racial hostility.” An outraged Sanders made it clear that “the whole quote is the federal government doesn’t give a shit about African Americans,” which is a vast departure from the previous iteration of the quote, which made Sanders out to be insensitive to race relations. However, it’s not just the Washington Post that has been accused of media bias against Sanders. Sanders supporters harshly critiqued CNN and protested the news organization in the brief ‘Occupy CNN’ movement in 2016, which coincidentally received little media attention. The movement questioned why mainstream media outlets like CNN focused more on Clinton’s campaign and Trump’s controversies, rather than giving each candidate fair media coverage. Although Sanders won large margins of victory in six states in a row, CNN decided instead to broadcast promos for an upcoming travel show after he came away with big wins in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington on Western Tuesday. While protesters jokingly gave CNN the nickname “Clinton News Network,” the fact CNN is owned by Time Warner, one of Clinton’s largest campaign donors in 2016, might indicate that the company deliberately intended to focus their attention on her campaign.

In early October of this year, a Sanders campaign ad created by Matt Orfaela titled “Rising Up” went viral. It highlighted statements by several media pundits criticizing Sanders for being too old, acting angry, appealing only to men, and failing to accomplish anything since his last campaign. It then contrasted those statements with clips showing otherwise: Sanders enthusiastically playing baseball at 78 years old, drawing a large base of female supporters to rallies, continuing to bring awareness to progressive policies that he has supported since the beginning of his political career while many other Democrats backed away from them, and even cracking a smile and laugh. As this campaign ad demonstrates, although media outlets are able to portray candidates in a certain light, these portrayals can be easily disproved by looking at the facts.

Although almost every politician has claimed unfair treatment by a news outlet at some point, there is one thing that sets media treatment of Sanders apart. Because of Sanders’s long history in politics, and the fact that he has maintained almost all of his core policies over the years, media critiques of Sanders manifest themselves differently than those of candidates who have more recently entered into the political limelight. Media outlets realize that they cannot accuse Sanders of being contradictory, so instead, most of their attacks are based on the supposed impossibility of his policies, or subjective factors such as his supposedly unengaging personality.

With social media making news consumption faster and easier, one may question the way mainstream media influence over voters has evolved. A 2016 study done in the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy highlighted how media reporting often directs attention to the competitive aspects of an election, making it appear as a game with winners and losers. According to the study: 

“The media’s tendency to allocate coverage based on winning and losing affects voters’ decisions. The press’s attention to early winners, and its tendency to afford them more positive coverage than their competitors, is not designed to boost their chances, but that’s a predictable effect.” 

The study also brings to light that these “biases” may not be due to a conspiracy against a certain candidate, but rather the media’s desire to draw in an audience. Oftentimes, consumers gravitate more towards negative stories, and sometimes negative news coverage can even lead to a positive outcome for a candidate. Shortly after Trump won the Repubican primary, his media coverage continued to skyrocket and shifted to focusing on his personality flaws and scandals, rather than his policies. However, the harms to his campaign were minimal, as he went on to win the 2016 election courtesy of two billion dollars in free media coverage. Unfortunately for Sanders and Clinton, negative media coverage did not produce the same outcome. While a lack of media attention on Sanders and his policies caused him to lag behind in the early stages of his campaign, Clinton received more coverage. However, hers manifested mostly in the form of attack ads, causing negative media coverage to mainly benefit Republicans in the long run during the presidential election.

One cannot deny that media companies such as the Washington Post and CNN have at times demonstrated a clear preference towards certain candidates and directed an overwhelming amount of criticism towards others, like Bernie Sanders. This is evident in both harsh critiques in articles, and deliberate lack of media attention despite promising campaign achievements. Big corporations only supporting campaigns that they fund would be an obvious explanation, but what cannot be denied also is the importance of the monetary pull that corporations gain by crafting eye-catching article titles. And it just so happens that what pulls in audiences is slander and character-attacking headlines. 

Sanders’s 2016 defeat has led to one of two reactions. On one hand, some were outraged and began to push for more progressive candidates. Others have been led to believe that only centrist and moderate candidates are capable of gaining office. While the number of moderate Democratic candidates is ever-increasing, with a number of candidates backing down from their promised Medicare for All proposals and other progressive policies, the post-2016 years have also seen an increasing number of leftist candidates gain office in the House and Senate. They bring with them policies that were previously been regarded as radical when it was mostly only Sanders advocating for them. While there may be an overwhelming number of published criticisms of Sanders, the biggest determinant of who will receive the Democratic nomination and who will win the 2020 election is the presence of a strong base of supporters. These supporters will be those who have the drive to vote in large numbers, and they will be those who are not discouraged by the failures of the past, or by articles asking “Is Bernie Sanders Serious?”