Article Analysis: the Bernie Blackout is Very Real

Editor's note: this article originally appeared November 19th, 2019 on my Facebook page - if you're looking for source materials, check out the comments section of the original article. For my latest book review "Why You Should Read Thomas Frank", please click here.

MSNBC Is the Most Influential Network Among Liberals: And It’s Ignoring Bernie Sanders

In today's edition of our ongoing article analysis feature, we're going to take a look at what I personally feel may be the most important piece of political media analysis released so far in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination cycle.

Throughout this nomination contest and the last Democratic Party primary season in 2016, supporters of the Democratic Socialist Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders have argued that mainstream corporate media in America has not only purposely avoided covering the Sanders campaign but what coverage they have offered has been dishonest, disingenuous and highly slanted towards negative (and often erroneous) conclusions about Bernie, his supporters and his campaign.

Well, if this November 13th, 2019 article about MSNBC's Democratic Party primary coverage by Branko Marcetic over at In These Times is indicative of the larger industry, it's now empirically possible to say Sanders supporters are *right* about the #BernieBlackout and it is instead the establishment media minions who called their complaints a "conspiracy theory" who now have some explaining to do.

Drawing on the tradition of extremely granular media analysis popularized by books like Manufacturing Consent and to a lesser degree, data science websites like FiveThirtyEight, Marcetic conducts a detailed examination of extremely blatant biases in MSNBC's coverage of the three leading Democratic Party nomination candidates in August and September across the network's top six prime time political shows; those three candidates of course being Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

As will likely come as no surprise to astute political media observers in America, it turns out that not only do MSNBC's top political analysts talk about Bernie Sanders less than Elizabeth Warren and far less than Joe Biden, but also that coverage of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC's flagship shows is far more likely to be negative than that of the other two candidates - which is pretty remarkable when you realize that one of the two months In These Times looked at featured a very real Joe and Hunter Biden corruption scandal that ties into the ongoing Trump impeachment and has itself driven an infinite number of whackjob Republican-endorsed conspiracy theories in what passes for the "mainstream" right wing media these days.

What really separates Marcetic's analysis in this article from the work of "data guys" like Nate Silver however, is his deep drilling into the specifics of MSNBC's coverage above and beyond the raw numbers to examine precisely *what* the network is saying about each of the three candidates, and the picture is not pretty. Far from a mere bias against Sanders, these clip by clip and argument by argument examples demonstrate that as a whole MSNBC's flagship political shows, their hosts and the vast majority of their guest pundits are actively campaigning against Bernie Sanders. Of course while that conclusion may not come as much of a shock to American leftists, it bears noting here that just a few months ago virtually every corporate media outlet in America accused the Sanders campaign of propagating Trumpian conspiracy theories when the Senator from Vermont had the audacity to suggest he and his supporters weren't getting a fair shake in the mainstream "liberal" media.

With meticulous attention to detail, Marcetic has logged numerous smears, misrepresentations and at times, even outright falsehoods disseminated in the network's war against Bernie, all the while pointing out key gaps in the coverage of any news events that could be perceived as somehow positive for the Sanders campaign. Perhaps even more alarmingly, this In These Times investigation clearly demonstrates that in MSNBC's quest to shut out Sanders and draw Liz Warren to the center, the network has largely abandoned coverage of policy proposals, agenda statements or action plans presented by literally *any* of the candidates whatsoever - as far as the network is concerned, this election is about an endless wave of breaking primary polls and while they're happy to inform you that Liz Warren "has a plan for that" they apparently have no intention of telling you what that plan might be.

The simple truth is that this is the "16 negative articles about Bernie Sanders in 16 hours on the Washington Post webpage" of the 2020 nomination cycle and unfortunately it appears to have slipped under the radar because mainstream media has no interest in sharing coverage from a nominally left wing media organization like In These Times.

Naturally there will be those who complain about the narrow scope of the study, and point to what they feel is "equally slanted" coverage in left wing publications like Jacobin, or Current Affairs but as Marcetic's data demonstrates, these people are being largely disingenuous. The numbers don't lie and MSNBC not only has a dominant hold on the liberal cable news market, but the network is particularly influential with age sixty-five and older viewers who are far more likely to vote in primaries than any other age demographic.

Due to its size and ubiquity in the public discourse, MSNBC is driving national opinions about the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest on a scale that dwarfs every outlet the American left has to access that same discourse - and the network is openly and demonstrably driving those opinions against Bernie Sanders. Try to keep that in mind the next time Chris Mathews wants to lecture you on the need to respect your elders in the party or Larry O'Donnell has opinions to share on the importance of a "free and *fair* press."

As even famous American author Ernest Hemingway eventually learned while trying to avoid relentless CIA harassment during his retirement in Cuba - it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

- 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, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

 
  

Article Analysis: Warren's Surrogate Gaffe, Media Double Standards towards Bernie and the Cone of Silence

Editor's note: this article originally appeared October 21st, 2019 on Facebook; for more of my recent writing, please check out my image blog at Can't You Read; including this piece of why war in Syria is still bad despite Trump, institutional loyalty, class and propaganda in "Ghost Wars" by Tim Weiner, and what's changed about liberal attitudes towards Ed Snowden in the past six years. 

All analysis by Nina Illingworth unless otherwise indicated.

---

"Elizabeth Warren Under Fire as Campaign Surrogate’s Racist, Homophobic Tweets Come to Light" 

Frankly I'm not going to spend a lot of time analyzing the above piece from October 14th because there's really not a whole lot to analyze here, but let's summarize a little bit: 

One of Elizabeth Warren's high-profile campaign surrogates (activist Ashlee Marie Preston) who happens to be a black trans woman made the ludicrous claim that Bernie Sanders has never supported the LGBT community and declared that she "had the receipts" to prove it. 

As it turns out however, it was Preston herself who had left a long list of receipts online - specifically all manner of homophobic, bigoted and racist tweets which I'm not going to bother to review here, you can just read the article if you want to get a good idea of how awful they were.

Predictably, Preston issued a defiant "sorry, not sorry" non-apology and began deleting tweets while the Warren campaign did everything it possibly could to deny any sort of official ties to Ashlee Marie - offering meekly that Preston was "not on the payroll" of the Warren campaign, which is pretty funny because I'm pretty sure Bernie Sanders isn't paying folks like Nina Turner or Killer Mike either but nobody would doubt they are Sanders campaign surrogates. As the photo at the top of the Law and Crime article above clearly indicates, Ashlee Marie Preston was clearly an official part of the Warren campaign and whether or not they paid her directly for her time and services out of the campaign kitty is completely irrelevant to the subject at hand. 

While the Warren campaign's response *is* more than just a little shameful, the simple truth is that I'm not here to bust Liz's chops for employing a bad campaign surrogate without doing the proper amount of vetting beforehand. Mind you, I do take exception to the campaign's attempts to portray itself as an innocent and friendly bystander while Liz uses folks like Preston and loyal think tanks like Demos to mercilessly slander and attack Sanders in the public discourse, but Warren isn't the first campaign to screw up by failing to properly vet a particularly aggressive and effective surrogate, nor will she be the last either. This is obviously a serious gaffe, but it's not even remotely as openly disqualifying as say Palooka Joe Biden's corruption or Trapper Keeper's habit of chucking binders at subordinates.

What I personally find more revealing about this whole sad episode is the nominally-liberal, mainstream corporate media's disturbing cone of silence surrounding a story which, if it had been a Sanders campaign surrogate, would almost certainly have been a front page story for at least a couple of days. There's a reason I'm sharing a link from Law and Crime, an objectively right wing (albeit not fascist) news blog and it's because if you do a Google search right now, you'll discover that while multiple "winger" outlets across the spectrum from blogs to Fox News picked up the story, it somehow didn't even rate a comment on sites like MSNBC, Vox, Salon, the Washington Post or any one of the numerous, even pro-Biden websites that dominate the "liberal blogosphere."

Naturally sycophants and apologists will simply argue that the incident isn't newsworthy and the right's only interests here are sensationalism and the endless culture war, but any fair-minded observer of the ongoing liberal vilification of both Bernie surrogate Susan Sarandon and Sanders himself for not disavowing Sarandon will know that's utter hogwash - this might not be disqualifying for Warren, but it sure as sh*t is "news" in any reasonable understanding of the word.

At this point it absolutely could not be *more* obvious that mainstream liberal media is openly "in the tank" for a Liz Warren nomination run; that's not a conspiracy, that's just a reasonable analysis of the available evidence and it should definitely concern you if you're still clinging to the lie that Warren is "basically the same" as Bernie if you're a working class voter. There's a reason Wall Street, billion dollar media corporations and rich Democratic Party donors are all "coming around" on Liz Warren and it certainly isn't because they now agree with Bernie's agenda - the same agenda these liberal media outlets want you to believe Warren has improved upon for her 2020 nomination run.

Indeed as those of you who study the growing phenomenon of online censorship are no doubt already aware, this problem actually goes much deeper than just the mainstream corporate media because the entire establishment is against Sanders and in on this cone of silence. For just one obvious example, do a quick Google search for "Susan Sarandon liberals insane" and then repeat that same search with "Duck Duck Go" - as you'll see, someone at Alphabet (the giant company that used to be Google) doesn't think pointing out the objectively insane liberal obsession with Susan Sarandon is worth including in the front four pages of results; that's not an accident (see below.)

Of course all of this will hardly be news to anyone who watched the Washington post publish sixteen negative headlines about Sanders in sixteen hours during the 2016 Democratic Primary but the obvious contradictions here, both in terms of the media's supposed role in the election process and the staggeringly obvious bias against Sanders require constant reminding in the face of this same "cone of silence." Elections are not supposed to be decided by an openly biased corporate media complex and the newsworthiness of a given story isn't supposed to have anything to do with whether or not the boss likes a given candidate - yet clearly, in the American "democratic" system, nothing is as it's "supposed" to be in a liberal democracy and the ruling classes are determined to stop Bernie Sanders and his labor class political revolution at all costs.

The obvious question then becomes, will the American labor class get "fooled again" or will they find a way to see past the cone of silence and an interconnected web of aristocratic lies to vote for the only candidate in the 2020 Dem Primary who actually represents their interests? 

Nobody can predict the future, but I'm willing to bet that after four years of lies, smears and open gaslighting against the real left and the roughly eighty-nine percent of American society that comprises the labor class, folks are awful tired of watching Lucy snatch away the football. If 2016 taught us anything it's that while the liberal corporate media can certainly *lose* an election, they are utterly incapable of winning one - unless liberal elites are prepared to shatter the Democratic Party into a thousand pieces by blatantly rigging another nomination process, Bernie Sanders will be the 2020 nominee on the Democratic side, and yes, he'll beat Donald Trump or Mike Pence regardless of how this impeachment inquiry shakes out.

This is the end of the line for neoliberalism; the only question left is will the rich folks burn the party to the ground to stall the rise of Democratic Socialism and thereby hand the country over to a reality TV show fascist (again) for another four years? I wouldn't bet against it, but after watching 26,000 excited people cram into a Sanders rally on a cold October Saturday, it's clear that they're going to have to do a little better than the same old cone of silence to stop Bernie's momentum this time.

- 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, Mastodon and Facebook.

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!  

Kingmaking II: Confidence Games

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.