I&I Editorial
With Joe Biden eating the now-frontrunning Bernie Sanders’ dust, garnering fewer than half of Sanders’ number of delegates in Nevada despite finishing second, after coming in fourth in Iowa and fifth in New Hampshire, you would think the decidedly left-leaning media would be popping the champagne corks.
The most radical major candidate in history being on track to getting the Democratic presidential nomination should spark celebrations in their newsrooms and studios. After all, whether it’s the New York Times or MSNBC, most print and TV journalists want a revolutionary transformation of American society just as much as Bernie does.
Yet instead, somehow, they’re in a state of panic.
At MSNBC, Chris Matthews was comparing the rise of Bernie to the fall of France to the Nazis, and even pondered whether four more years of President Trump would be better for the Democratic Party than a Sanders Administration. “Democrats need to sober up,” warned his fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid.
The left-wing magazine In These Times examined MSNBC’s treatment of Sanders last November and found that “Sanders received not only the least total coverage (less than one-third of Biden’s), but the most negative.” In These Times investigative fellow Branko Marcetic added that network commentators “increasingly singled out Sanders for criticism. He ‘shouted his way through that last debate and came off as a bit of a scold,’” the magazine quoted MSNBC’s Brian Williams. “He was ‘out of step on the biggest sort of cultural issue in the country right now,’ said Deadline: White House host Nicole Wallace, in reference to guns. He was helping Trump’s re-election chances, said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Hardball.”
Marcetic noted that Sanders, like rival Elizabeth Warren, had put out numerous detailed policy proposals. But: “Most of these 18 plans were ignored by MSNBC, and only two were discussed in any depth,” according to Marcetic, whose dubious ultimate conclusion is that the explanation is capitalism. “Of course, the anchors on MSNBC’s flagships are part of a larger corporate media system, and the parameters of the consent they create is modulated by the terms of acceptable public discourse.”
The Establishment Media’s Ideology Indicted
The New York Times, unable to settle on one candidate, instead endorsed two, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. Of Bernie Sanders, the “Newspaper of Record” in doing so complained, “He boasts that compromise is anathema to him,” and “Only his prescriptions can be the right ones, even though most are overly rigid, untested and divisive. He promises that once in office, a groundswell of support will emerge to push through his agenda.”
According to the Times, sending Bernie to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would be “exchanging one over-promising, divisive figure in Washington for another.”
Even CNN on Monday highlighted the Sanders campaign’s anger at MSNBC’s negativity regarding their man. “I think one of the big questions is how and whether news outlets reassess whether they got it right on Bernie,” his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, told CNN on Sunday. “And if not, how does that change coverage going forward? What are they missing about Bernie’s appeal?”
Shakir is shrewd enough to know that the left-leaning media aren’t missing a thing about Bernie’s popularity; the nation’s press establishment would love to place him inside the confines of the White House. But they know that the left doesn’t win elections in the United States of America by putting their cards on the table.
They remember George McGovern’s extreme agenda being mocked as “acid, amnesty and abortion,” and his loss of 49 states to incumbent President Richard Nixon in 1972. They also remember Bill Clinton’s win after promising an economic policy that “starts with a tax cut for the middle class” – a tax cut Clinton abandoned before he was even inaugurated, after which he increased income tax rates.
For Democrats, telling the truth about their intentions doesn’t win power at the ballot box.
The establishment media were infinitely more impressed by Barack Obama’s oft-repeated empty promise – “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it. If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too. The only change you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold” – than by Sanders spelling out his intentions on providing free college, wiping away student debt, the abolition of private health coverage, and the Green New Deal, Bernienomics total price tag possibly reaching an incomprehensible $60 trillion.
Not that these same journalists wouldn’t be thrilled if a President Biden or President Bloomberg executed some or all of these items on the Sanders agenda. But by spilling the beans about expanding and tightening government control, the Vermont senator is almost certainly ensuring disaster for the Democratic Party in November, in both the race for the White House and Congress.
It’s a damning indictment of the ideas of Big Government that the media who themselves embrace them are doing their utmost this year to get someone nominated who won’t talk them up. The American people, you see, don’t know what’s good for them. You don’t tell them they’re getting their medicine until you’ve tricked them into opening their mouths wide.
— Written by Thomas McArdle
Note to Readers: Issues & Insights is a new site launched by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to use our decades of experience to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day.
We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we think our approach to commentary is sorely lacking both in today’s mainstream media and on the internet. If you like what you see, feel free to click the Tip Jar over on the right sidebar. And be sure to tell your friends!
Democrats know their candidates lie, Republicans pray theirs are telling the truth. The media knows Democrats lose when they tell the truth. They don’t have to… Because Democrats know their candidates lie….
Bernie could best be described as the Burlington “town crank” for decades as he slummed around town as a n’er-do-well odd jobs Bolshevik harassing anyone he could corral or would listen to his rants against the wealthy, while living in a dirt-floored, Sterno-heated shack until he was 40 years old. He was the joyless, raving Marxist-admiring bum who ran for various offices and got 0.01% of the vote for 15 years until he caught on with the Leftist cabal in his little town and became the town crank mayor. It is a measure of our lunacy that this nothing is now at the top of one of our two major political parties and isn’t even a member of one. Go figure.
Bernie has a long and uninterrupted history of Marxist training and thought from his first instruction when he sought out and went to Israel to live in a Stalinist Kibbutz and was later a member of various Communist political parties advocating for and praising every known communist dictator and regime on the planet. As an active member and official of the American Socialist Workers Party – the last known political party of which he was a member, btw – he even heaped praise on the Ayatollah of Iran and his mobs during their hostage taking of our embassy!
Sanders needs to be openly confronted with his past and thinly hidden present devotion to Marx so those outside the “can be fooled all the time” voting contingent are exposed to what Bernie really is. I have a suggestion of how to do that.
Someone with access and a camera needs to be the one to directly confront Comrade Sanders in front of a camera with, “Will you disavow and rebuke here today the mantra, ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs?’” His response in words and/or expressions will mark him as the unadorned Marxist he is. This is the heart of his ideological being and the prescription for the theft from producers which is its center. I doubt he will lie. In fact, I’ll bet he will stick that gnarly old finger in our faces, as is his disgusting habit, and try to convert us proletariats to his brand of Command & Control collectivism…with him on top, of course.
Well, that would make for a great debate question: “Will you disavow and rebuke the principle of ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs?'” But Bernie, like many skilled Washington politicians, is very good at deflecting tough questions. My old bosses Evans & Novak on their CNN show knew how to deal with that: keep asking the question again and again and point out that he’s not answering it. But that is kind of a lost art among TV journalists today. They’ll ask a second time, but not a third.
I can hear Bob Novak’s voice this second saying, “I’m gonna try one more time, Senator, to see if you’ll answer my question …”!
When Bernie said the Social Security was socialism, Democrat party insiders dived down their rat-holes. After all these decades, someone finally said it out loud – the Republicans were right in the 1930s, and the ‘progressive’ Democrats were all liars.