Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign event in Essex Junction. Photo / Erin Schaff, The New York Times
Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign event in Essex Junction. Photo / Erin Schaff, The New York Times
When a BuzzFeed News colleague and I sat down with Bernie Sanders in his Capitol Hill office in 2015, he started with a thank you — for doing what you do to provide an alternative to the corporate media.
We stammered a bit, and half apologised. We weren't really doingthat, sir; our backers were venture capitalists. He'd have to find an alternative elsewhere.
Bernie Sanders has been searching for that alternative to for-profit media for a long time. Back in 1981, when he became mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he turned to his staff and said: "We can't survive. We have to develop our own media."
Television crews at a campaign rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Photo / Erin Schaff, The New York Times
And while some left-wing media outlets are now emerging, they're not going to flower in time to save his campaign.
That became painfully clear last Wednesday when, after his stunning setback on Super Tuesday, Sanders bent the knee and submitted to a barrage of not particularly friendly questions from the most powerful progressive on TV, the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
He had been avoiding the network, suspicious of its wealthy hosts and corporate owners. He told Maddow in mild exasperation that one of his challenges was "taking on the corporate media, if I might say so."
It was clear the primary voting had shaken the Vermont senator's whole theory of the election — that he could mobilise a huge new cohort of young people.
At the same time, the events of the past week have validated much of his criticism of the media, the subject of a 1988 town hall with Sanders and the radical provocateur Abbie Hoffman. Sanders complained that Vermont's television stations had been "prostituted by commercials."
His main point: "The media itself is as important a political issue as exists."
Sanders is right about that, and about two other big things: that much of the U.S. media still covers elections as if they're sporting events and that the affluent New Yorkers who run and appear on television networks are not inclined to like him. The narrative of Joe Biden's comeback was an irresistible story to the media — one that often eclipsed the coronavirus, never mind discussion of health care or poverty — on cable news in recent days.
The distance between Sanders' supporters and media executives could be felt with particular intensity in the halls of MSNBC last week. After Chris Matthews, the beloved embodiment of MSNBC's establishmentarian centrism, compared Sanders' campaign to the Nazi invasion of France, Sanders' supporters began a drumbeat of criticism that helped lead to Matthews' ouster. When Joe Biden — the Chris Matthews of politics — emerged as the Democratic front-runner on Super Tuesday, the on-air relief at MSNBC was palpable.
Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks to reporters in Salt Lake City, Utah. Photo / Erin Schaff, The New York Times
"What a whole lot of people here see," said one senior producer, "is the same thing as Trump."
That perspective is widely shared in the news business: That Sanders — and really any politician who is hostile, or even cranky, to the media — is following in President Donald Trump's footsteps.
It's a canard. Trump is a star of the corporate media who hacked its commercial incentives to his advantage, delivering free lively entertainment to cable networks desperate for programming. Trump wants to control that media, and to discredit competing voices. Sanders wants to remake the media in a new model.
"Trump knew how to weaponise that capitalistic greed against them, whereas Bernie's approach has been just to build those other channels," said Krystal Ball, a former MSNBC host who has emerged as a leading voice of the pro-Sanders left.
Ball's morning show for The Hill website is one of a handful of signs that the media landscape is beginning to shift in Sanders' direction. The show, which she co-hosts with a young Trump-backing conservative named Saagar Enjeti, posted impressive numbers on YouTube, with more than 3.4 million hours watched over the last month.
The show's fans span left- and right-wing populism. They include leftist insurgents at The Intercept like Glenn Greenwald, who on Twitter called the show a "super-perky radical trans-ideological 21st Century subversive sequel to the Katie Couric/Matt Lauer morning Today Show in its heyday (minus all that unpleasantness)." Among its right-wing admirers are Steve Bannon, Trump's former campaign adviser, who in an interview described Ball as "hard core," along with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who texted that the two "seem to understand, better than almost anyone else talking about it, what's really happening in American politics."
