Obviously, the best thing about analyzing a horse race is the fact that you have to wade through quite a lot of horse sh*t to figure anything out - oh, wait, that's not awesome at all actually. Sadly however, manufactured narratives, smears and propaganda in the mainstream media rarely sort themselves out in a timely manner, so here we are again.
In my previous Media Madness article, we talked a little bit about how a neoliberal, anti-Bernie unity ticket under Biden might begin to coalesce under the right conditions and why the Congressional Black Caucus was trying to negotiate a VP slot for Kamala Harris before the first primary even fired. I also briefly touched on the fact that corporate media outlets were hyping-up any sketchy poll with terrible methodology that showed Joe Biden with a big lead over Bernie Sanders; stuff like focusing entirely on landline polling, drawing sweeping conclusions from self-selecting internet surveys or using samples that feature a statistically insignificant number of voters under fifty years of age, and so on.
Even with clear evidence that the mainstream political and media establishments in America are certainly working to inflate the size of Biden's apparent lead over Sanders however, it's important to note that Palooka Joe is in fact still leading over Bernie Sanders in the polls - at least for the moment. Furthermore, this is despite the fact that both the burgeoning US left, and many establishment "center-left" liberals, are fully aware that Joe Biden is objectively hot vomit in a cup as a candidate.
Which then just leaves us with the horrifying but otherwise fairly simple question of... why? To begin to answer that, let's take a look at this May 13th, 2019 post from Nate Silver's vanity "statistical analysis" website, Five-Thirty-Eight:
Biden Is (Still) Leading Cable News Coverage
First and foremost we should note that this article itself is objectively terrible horse racing garbage; most of it focuses on pumping tires for 538's pet project candidate (Liz Warren) and excusing the excessive cable news media coverage of Biden by noting that some of it was negative - a fact that in many ways, is largely meaningless. Let's ignore all that nonsense and look at the important part of the article, the data chart:
Yes indeed, you've read that correctly - last week Joe Biden got almost as much cable news coverage as all of the other nineteen "major" Democratic Party 2020 nomination candidates combined; including well over three times as much coverage as his closest rival in the polls, Bernie Sanders. Furthermore, this is hardly a "new" phenomenon - these numbers have remained pretty constant since Biden announced his candidacy in April, as author Dhrumil Mehta noted in his previous installment of this feature.
Look we can argue until we're blue in the face about age splits, focus group polling and the vastly overstated "anti-Sanders" movement among affluent, mainstream liberals, the reality is that early polling metrics are going to be heavily swayed by familiarity/name recognition and that in turn, is going to be overwhelmingly influenced by the sheer volume of media mentions. This phenomenon will of course be intimately familiar to Bernie Sanders supporters who likely remember the total media blackout the Senator's campaign endured well into the middle portions of the Democratic Party nomination race in 2015 and 2016. In other words, Biden is clearly getting a significantly early boost in the polls, because of corporate cable news coverage.
Okay well, so what right? Biden only officially announced his candidacy at the end of April and he's recently be embroiled in a couple of serious scandals involving inappropriate touching of women and conflict of interest in the Ukraine (the latter of which may not even be true.) To some degree, it's natural that Biden is driving coverage right now, isn't it? In a vacuum, one would have to think that eventually the combination of "bad coverage" and the news cycle moving beyond Biden's entrance into the race, should cause a leveling out of media attention and a corresponding drop in the polls - at least, in theory.
The problem of course is that politics are not conducted in a vacuum and as with all things involving the corporate, for-profit media in America, class interests generate a tremendous amount of gravity when it comes to the media's behavior, both in terms of which candidates they choose to cover, and how they're going to be portrayed in this nomination contest. When you combine Biden's staggeringly disproportionate amount of (often defensive) cable news coverage, constant efforts to disparage Bernie's chances of winning the nomination in the mainstream press and absurdly premature corporate media declarations about the perceived inevitability of Joe Biden, a different and far less innocent picture quickly emerges - a picture that will seem eerily familiar to anyone who wasn't living under a rock during the 2016 Democratic Party nomination contest.
Hey, speaking of gravity; do you think there's any chance the amount of fawning cable news coverage awarded to Biden might have anything to do with the fact that Palooka Joe kicked off his campaign with a "a $2,800 per person fundraiser at the home of David L. Cohen, the executive vice president and chief of lobbying for Comcast" - which owns MSNBC, the country's premier "liberal" cable news network?
Comcast-Owned MSNBC in the Tank for Joe Biden’s Presidential Run
Well then, there's certainly nothing fishy going on here right? Run along citizen, nothing to see behind the yellow tape..
Look, it's no secret that the wealthy owners of large media companies do not like Sanders, and you'd have to be a complete goddamn idiot to believe that didn't affect how the democratic socialist Senator from Vermont is portrayed in the mainstream corporate media. Furthermore, this animus towards Bernie is only matched by the intense, white-hot hatred of Clintonite apparatchiks who have already openly declared their desire to see a mainstream media war against Sanders during this primary process; a wish that seems considerably more ominous when you remember the *cough* "close" relationship between the Clinton campaign and mainstream liberal media in 2016. Throw in "sekret" establishment Democrat meetings about how to stop Sanders and open declarations from the oligarchy that his nomination would be considered unacceptable, and you have more than the makings of a ruling class plot to ratf*ck Bernie Sanders - can you really even call it a conspiracy if all this is being done out in the open?
It is abundantly clear that the elite establishment in America is doing, and will continue to do, everything in their power to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the 2020 Dem Party nomination. As the only candidate in the polls leading or even coming close to matching Bernie's level of support, Joe Biden is the obvious early beneficiary of these machinations - particularly now, long before the debates and while the primary source of information on how the race is going is the same mainstream corporate media that wishes Sanders would f*ck off and die. That Biden is in the lead and received a polling bump from announcing his campaign is hardly novel, or even remotely surprising - the question for Palooka Joe has always been whether or not his lead will "survive contact with an actual campaign."
After a whooping three weeks on the hustings, with every possible advantage the elite mainstream establishment could grant him, things are "so far, so good" for Joe Biden - but would-be kingmakers and concerned democratic socialists would be advised to remember that Bernie Sanders has already demonstrated that he can make up a vast amount of ground on the corporate media's anointed candidate, in a very short period of time.
This contest is far from over; frankly, we've only just begun.
- Nina Illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.
Updates available on Twitter and Facebook.
No comments:
Post a Comment