Sen. Bernie Sanders has been complaining during campaign stops about the lack of attention paid to his message by the media, and the general lack of seriousness they accord his very successful efforts at securing the Democratic nomination.
In part he says that news outlets are more interested in “political gossip” than real issues, recently telling one campaign audience, the media “thinks that you’re pretty dumb and all you can deal with is six-second sound bites and one issue at a time.”
And in part, as he has said, “the nature of our campaign is not something that fits into the way corporate media covers campaigns,” and “to some degree, our values are in conflict with the ownership of corporate media as well.”
Whatever the cause, which I suspect is a combination of the two reasons above, the Washington Post cites a comment by Sen. Sanders that he would be doing better in the polls if he were treated fairly, which is probably true.
He has seized upon a study that showed the nightly ABC, CBS and NBC newscasts had dedicated a combined 234 minutes of coverage exclusively to Trump this year, compared with just 10 minutes exclusively for Sanders. In an interview, Sanders said he has started talking more about Trump in campaign appearances, partly as a strategy to get the attention of news organizations he sees as obsessed with the GOP front-runner.
The Post notes that Sanders spends a lot of time talking about budget issues, war, Obamacare, Social Security, and income inequality rather than “topics dominating the news, including terrorist attacks in Paris and the mass shootings in San Bernadino. While touching on those events, Sanders has struck to his core message on economic issues.”
For those who follow Canadian politics, there is an interesting story going back to the early 90s that is relevant.
Prime Minister Kim Campbell was quoted as having said “an election is no time to discuss serious issues” in response to a reporter’s question during the 1993 federal election. [One of the opposition parties] accused Campbell of wanting to reform social programs without consulting the provinces. Campbell asserts she was misquoted by the reporter and said she only meant that 47 days (the average length of a Canadian federal election) were not enough tackle such serious issues.
Whatever she might have meant, she was later slaughtered at the polls for says what many political watchers consider obvious: campaigns are at best a very difficult time to have serious policy discussions, but it’s one thing to campaign as if voters are not able or interested enough to follow the details required for governing, it is something else to tell them as much.
In defence of Senator Sanders, maybe he’s right that the only reason serious policy discussions are difficult to come by during campaigns is that the media doesn’t believe voters are capable enough or interested enough to follow what can be fairly demanding stuff.
Good for him for telling an audience in Iowa recently, “We have to tell the corporate media that we are smart enough to deal with more than one issue at a time.”
So, there’s that. Corporate media is about selling a product and public policy may not be, in their eyes, interesting enough to keep the ratings up. What do you suppose is likely to drive ratings more effectively, a robust discussion about what it would take to reinstitute Glass-Steagall, or yet another one of Donald Trump’s ridiculous outbursts?
The other argument made by Sen. Sanders and others on his behalf is “built on the notion that only a handful of corporations control major media outlets, which as a result are disinclined to run stories contrary to the economic interests of their owners.”
“The positions that I advocate, which demand that the wealthy and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes, those are not necessarily the views that corporate America likes or that corporate media likes,” Sanders said during a recent stop at a senior center in New Hampshire.
While I think there is much to be said for this argument, I believe it requires some degree of nuance. Certainly one can point to news outlets that are clearly biased in their reporting, but I suspect the real point is that most of the media, and reporters, have a fairly narrow view of what should be treated as serious news. It’s the world they work in, the corporate world that rewards or punishes them for understanding or failing to understand how things “really work,” how the economy works and how serious people think and act.
Wealthy and large corporations don’t have to actively censor the news because they so completely control the system of rewards and punishment for organizations and reporters delivering the news.
In this way too, other reporters, the peer group, decide what should be taken seriously, and it’s very difficult to move beyond those norms.
Again, I think Sen. Sanders is right, but understanding the way that certain ideas get a fair hearing and others do not may require a deeper dive.
An academic quoted in the aforementioned Washington Post story says Sen. Sanders “bears some responsibility for drawing less news coverage. The candidate often gives the same hour-long stump speech at his rallies, focused on income inequality and other issues impacting working class voters, which provides little new material for reporters to write about.”
He says, “Look at the word ‘news.” The press wants to know what you have for us today that’s new.”
But is that the point? The media first became interested in Sen. Sanders because his message was resonating with a lot of people. When that story, the size of the crowds, became old, they had to consider the quality of arguments, which many of them deemed unserious given the norms of the corporate world they serve.
In political reporting, anything can be talked about. It’s the seriousness with which ideas are treated that matters.
What Sen. Sanders is offering is quite new. In fact, it’s too new for many who decide what matters.
In American politics social-democratic ideas are too often considered awfully cute by the media but silly or unrealistic. And that is Bernie Sanders’ cross to bear.
Follow me on Twitter: @RichardKBarry1
Retired political staffer/civil servant. Dual U.S./Canadian citizen writing about politics on both sides of the border. Twitter @Richard05569297, cross-posting at PhantomPublic.org