Fear, Loathing and Mayonnaise in the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination Contest

Editor's note: this article originally appeared as a lengthy thread posted during November 21st, 2019 on my Mastodon account - there may be a few reference links I didn't feature here, that appear at the bottom of that thread if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Over the past few months, I've extensively covered the US corporate "liberal" media's clear attempts to influence the outcome of the 2020 Democratic Party nomination process in excruciating detail.

From NY Times smears designed to make the Sanders campaign look like a sexual harassment factory, to endless hours of coverage defending Palooka Joe Biden's racist babbling and on through the nonexistent coverage of a bigoted Liz Warren surrogate, a clear pattern of anti-Bernie bias has emerged. While this bias often expresses itself it many different and subtle forms, I think at this point it's safe to say that the pattern has been clearly demonstrated and the American corporate media is openly (and increasingly frantically) trying to influence the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest against Sanders - and in favor of candidates who are perceived by the liberal establishment as capable of beating Sanders. 

Clearly the machine is no longer sure that Joe Biden is such a candidate either.

This brings us to the “liberal” corporate media coverage surrounding an unlikely rise in the “First in the Nation” state polls of neoliberal candidate-like substance Pete Buttigieg; who will hereafter referred to in this space as Dollar Store Macron, or Mayo Pete - as befits his soulless, plastic & relentlessly focus-tested politics. To note that Mayo Pete has become the mainstream liberal establishment's latest "Great White Hope" is both not a metaphor and indicative of their open desperation.

If at this point you are still blissfully unaware of who Dollar Store Macron is, or precisely why I would describe his politics as "plastic and soulless" I'd encourage you to take a moment to stop and read this excellent profile of Mayo Pete by Nathan J Robinson over at Current Affairs - a piece recommended by  Noam Chomsky himself:

All About Pete

To learn more about the super villain factory Mayo Pete used to work for, a corporation called McKinsey & Company; check out this article by an anonymous former employee of the company, also published at Current Affairs: 

McKinsey & Company: Capital’s Willing Executioners

Finally, if you're still on the fence about whether or not Dollar Store Macron is an objectively terrible candidate for both the nomination and the office of POTUS, please read this extremely detailed and well sourced Twitter thread by user @niktaylorde for more information:

Why You Shouldn't Vote For Pete Buttigieg - A Thread

In other words, Pete Buttigieg is not only a terrible candidate for the labor class, but also a reasonably horrible human being - not that you'll really hear much about any of this in the media of course; the fact that he's young, gay and currently skullf*cking a "catchy" Panic At the Disco track to generate false enthusiasm at his campaign events, is pretty much as far as the corporate media's analysis is going to go when it comes to Mayo Pete.

This is unfortunate for the American voter because the Dollar Store Macron campaign has a serious problem that not only makes his campaign nonviable in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest, but could imperil his general election chances even if he somehow managed to win - Mayo Pete is currently polling below "raisins in potato salad" with African American voters; depending on which poll you examine, we're talking about a number between zero and one percent, literally.

Why? Well if you believe the insinuations of obtuse Buttigieg campaign spokesperson Lis Smith, it's because African American voters are homophobic; a narrative that even Dollar Store Macron himself has since (wisely) rejected:

Sharpton: 'We don't have an epidemic of homophobia' in the black community

  

Of course, that didn't stop the Buttigieg campaign from quietly leaking a focus group study that explicitly said Pete's sexuality is why black voters don't like him, back in October:

Buttigieg focus groups found being gay ‘a barrier’ for some black South Carolina voters

For a more accurate (and less "objectively racist") picture however, let's turn to The Intercept's Ryan Grim to study an example of the staggeringly tone-deaf, low-key racist way Mayor Pete has approached winning over African American voters in the run up to the 2020 Democratic Party primary season: 

The Problem with Pete Buttigieg's "Douglass Plan" for Black America

Whoa boy, so let's get unpack this for a moment here:

Mayo Pete, a man who is already haunted by anger over a court battle brought on by the South Bend, Indiana mayor's firing of a black police chief for recording his racist co-workers, and accusations of racist policies in his "model college town" of South Bend, is reaching out to black voters with a policy program named after cherished African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass - and amazingly enough, that's only strike one here.

Efforts to promote the Douglass Plan revolved around a published list of 400 prominent South Carolinians who were behind the plan, but this too demonstrated a willful attempt to mislead and deceive by the Buttigieg campaign. The list was represented as consisting of prominent African Americans, and yet almost half of the names on it were from white voters. The list also featured a cover letter that by use of the phrase “there is one presidential candidate who has proven to have intentional policies designed to make a difference in the Black experience, and that’s Pete Buttigieg” strongly implied the signers had endorsed Dollar Store Macron for the Democratic Party nomination; that wasn't true either - in fact, some of the "signers" worked for the Sanders campaign and others didn't even mean to endorse the Douglass Plan itself, let alone Mayo Pete.

When asked about this discrepancy directly the Buttigieg campaign offered up the wholly unserious answer that the so-called signers were sent an email encouraging them to "opt out" of endorsing the plan; you probably don't need me to tell you that this is absolutely *not* how endorsements work in American politics but as a side note, I'd like to point out that only a soulless cockroach McKinsey consultant would try to use the Columbia House Records scam to swindle endorsements from black leaders.

The final cherry on top of it all, and indeed the only part of this whole sad saga that received any significant amount of attention in the mainstream media at all, was that the Buttigieg campaign included a photo of a black woman who hadn't endorsed anything or anyone, had no connection to the campaign and had no idea why she'd been used in Dollar Store Macron's promotional material - because she's from Kenya. 

Pete Buttigieg says he was unaware that stock photo on his website depicted a Kenyan woman

And therein lies the crux of my argument and the definitive proof that the corporate "liberal" media is openly campaigning for anyone but Bernie in the 2020 Democratic Party nomination contest.

Imagine just for a moment the absolute righteous fury that would have consumed "liberal" mainstream pundits and influencers if it was Bernie Sanders who'd lied about African American endorsements to prop up his credentials with black voters? Imagine if it had been Bernie who'd responded with "Ma'am, I’m not asking for your vote" when confronted by a distraught African American voter about a police shooting of a young black man in the city he served as mayor? What if Bernie had started his political career by forcing out a black police chief on behalf of clearly racist cops inside the South Bend power structure?

Keep in mind that we're talking about the same guy here, Dollar Store Macron is responsible for all of these actions.

Frankly, you really don't even have to imagine - contrast the utter silence on Mayo Pete's (at best) obtuse honky nonsense, with the mainstream media dogpile Sanders was subjected to when he advised a young African American man to focus on not getting shot first, when pulled over by the police; after a question I won't describe as "unfair" but tragically, I cannot say there was a possible "good answer" for.

All throughout the 2016 primary process we were told by "Very Serious People TM" in the liberal media that African Americans, in particular black women, were the most important demographic in the electorate, and that a Democrat victory would not be possible in either 2016 or 2020 without the support of non-white voters. Specifically this narrative was used to hammer Bernie's campaign as supposedly "too white, and out of touch" or perhaps even outright racist - the last of which is absurd.

Now, today we find that the polling numbers show Sanders has*the* most diverse group of supporters, while pumped-up chosen "Bernie Slayers" like Elizabeth Warren and now Dollar Store Macron are driven by the same "too white, out of touch" voting demographic that supposedly rendered Bernie unelectable - and the response from the mainstream "liberal" media has been literally some combination of excuse-making apologia to go with complete and utter silence.

Of course none of that is to say that Dollar Store Macron hasn't been in the news; corporate "liberal" media in a America are falling all over themselves to type up a 255 respondent poll with dodgy methodology and an admitted 6.1% margin of error that shows Mayo Pete up an astounding +15% and leading New Hampshire - this of course pairs nicely with an equally dodgy recent poll from Iowa that once again showed Buttigieg leading, this time up by a mere (and implausible) +14%. Even that coverage demonstrates a considerable amount of bias; after all the media is hardly mentioning that Pete is dropping a massive amount of money to try to win one of these two (mostly white) "First in the Nation" primaries, or that if he doesn't win at least one of them the puffed up narrative (again aided by this same "liberal" media) surrounding his presidential aspirations is going to look like a pathetic punchline - instead, the corporate media would rather continue to attack Bernie Sanders.

Like all truly good lies however, there was a tiny bit of truth in the mainstream media's smearing of the Sanders campaign - it is in fact awfully hard to win a national election as a Democrat with only white voters, and doubly hard to win a Democratic Party nomination contest by that same measure; the trick is that this isn't a problem for Bernie (who appeals to young people and women especially across all demographics) it's a problem for candidates like Mayo Pete and Pow Wow Chow Liz Warren.

Furthermore, if one presupposes that most of the people reading this are in fact not racists and would prefer to live in a word where the fight against racism is undertaken seriously, the fact that the liberal media cynically used cries of racism to burn down the Sanders campaign, but has hardly chirped a note about the kind of cracker nonsense Mayo Pete's campaign is engaging in, represents a troubling continuation of longstanding enabling of structural racism by affluent liberals and Democrats.

The truth here is that no matter how hard the so-called "liberal" mainstream media in America tries to shove Mayo Pete into the spotlight and generate a plausible theory by which he can become president, Dollar Store Macron isn't going to win the 2020 Dem Party nomination contest - and it's not because he's gay, or because black people aren't thankful enough for his casual displays of obtuse racism; it's because he f*cking sucks as acandidate and bougie "liberal" pundits are getting desperate.

- 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.

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"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!  

Article Analysis: Fake Polls & the Anti Bernie Narrative in the Media

Editor's note: over the past few years I've done literally everything in my power not to duplicate content across multiple websites but I've finally reached the point where social media censorship is forcing my hand. The following informal article analysis essay originally appeared on Facebook, but since that company is currently (and obviously) throttling how many views my account gets until I give them money - I'm forced to re-post it here:

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The vast majority of the time I post a focused article analysis piece on Facebook it's because I'm looking to highlight glaringly obvious mistakes in the mainstream media's coverage. Today I thought I'd switch gears and take a look at this delightful piece of low budget independent journalism by Ashok Koyi on his website which appears to be called "the Kalinga" - Koyi drills deeper into a recent Iowa 2020 Democratic Party primary poll that got a lot of mainstream media play and discovers that not all is what it seems.

You can find the article here: 

https://thekalinga.in/2019/09/20/manufatucturing-consent/ 

With the important note that Ashok's article appears to be the result of multiple Twitter sleuths (two of which he credits at the bottom of the piece) I'd like to start by noting that I agree with almost everything the author states in this piece. Furthermore the investigative methodology is sound and the conclusion Koyi draws from his investigation of the people behind this poll is completely inarguable - namely that this isn't so much a "poll" as a mainstream liberal Frankenstein memo designed to manufacture the narrative that Iowa is going for Biden or Warren and Sanders is doomed.

In particular I encourage readers to please note the following paragraph taken from Koyi's report:

"The most important aspect being

"Binder specializes in qualitative rather than quantitative research. His focus is on assessing subjective factors such as language, emotion, and attitudes."

To me, all this word salad means only one thing. It means he mind-reads potential voters when conducting his polling. In simple terms the polls capture his feelings of voter’s feelings about politicians

I have never heard a worse way to describe a pollster than this. Given that only the memo is published without the underlying dataset, I am assuming that this poll is based on the feelings of David Binder staff about which democratic candidate gets what percentage of votes in Iowa in the upcoming democratic primary election"

This analysis is dead-bang on and although the author is generous enough to allow for the possibility that this isn't a mockery of traditional polling, I am not so kind - the poll in question is clearly paid for propaganda designed to discourage Sanders supporters and hopefully keep them from voting for Bernie in the primary.

This of course brings up the larger issue of the rise in paid polling outfits that operate like public relations and marketing firms over roughly the past decade. As anyone familiar with the Koch-backed climate change denial industry can attest, it is now possible for literally anyone at all to hire a polling company to produce a poll that manufactures whatever specific narrative you like. Typically this will be accomplished with some combination of leading or ambiguous questions or carefully targeting polling by a region's average annual income - who can forget the CNN poll upon which Biden's case as an "unassailable front-runner" was built up in the media, including in particular and to the surprise of no one, CNN! What was only mentioned on Right Wing News sites however is the fact that the polling company somehow managed not to sample a "statistically significant" number of 18-49 year olds who probably wouldn't have been all that jazzed about Biden.

The simple truth is that "he who pays the piper, calls the tune" and while political campaigns demand accuracy from their internal polling contractors, they are not above hiring what amounts to PR firms like Focus on Rural America and the company of its founder, Link Strategies, to manufacture a specific narrative in the media. These results are then fed to influential figures in the public discourse and you've essentially created the idea that Bernie is finished and Warren is ascendant out of nothing. Now traditionally, the mainstream media has been considered a safeguard against spurious polling because they not only sponsor a number of polls that are in theory designed to be accurate, but they also publish the methodology behind those polls when they release him. What happens however when the mainstream corporate media itself is now controlled by politically active billionaire titans of industry like say, Jeff Bezos? What happens when massive American corporate media companies are the ones paying the piper, and the tune they want to hear is that Bernie loses? Well, in this case what clearly happened is a B.S. poll designed to suppress pro-Sanders turnout in Iowa got treated seriously in the mainstream media for a few days; whether or not it actually stops Iowans from voting Sanders in five months is less clear - but that is certainly the intent of the exercise.

Look, this is big business and these folks will go to any length to rig even meaningless internet polls - good examples include Trump fixer Michael Cohen hiring an IT firm to try and rig a GOP nomination contest Drudge Poll or the weirdo Pelosi fanboys over at Daily Kos rigging weekly forum polls against Sanders by banning almost every Bernie supporter during the 2016 election. Obviously there is a certain amount of value in using rigged polls to suggest a political narrative and clearly it's fairly effective.

Who watches the watchmen when the watchmen have all been bought?

Go back and read Koyi's report at the top of this article again and ask yourself how many people are going to bother to take the roughly ten steps it takes Ashok to figure out this "poll" is utter nonsense, before they decide to believe it or not?

Right, the answer is "almost nobody."

As I've written numerous times since the real Democratic Party 2020 nomination fight kicked off just before Christmas in 2018, the mainstream corporate media, the Democratic Party and rich liberal elites are prepared to do anything, say anything and push any narrative to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the Dem nomination - precisely *because* they know that he will beat Trump.

Since that time, the Manhattan Island media and Beltway Think Tank glitterati have rotated through a seemingly never ending cast of "Bernie Slayer" ascendant candidates who had supposedly already rendered Sanders and his revolution irrelevant. One by one Lock Em Up Kamala, Trapper Keeper, Skateboard Jesus and Dollar Store Macron have fallen by the wayside only moments after the establishment media told you they were in the driver's seat. Now Palooka Joe Biden is in the act of falling on his sword and a newly conciliatory Liz Warren is hanging out with Wall Street executives and Hillary Clinton - you'd have to be a complete idiot not to see what's going on here at this point.

The narrative that the Bernie Sanders political revolution is already dead will never die, so long as the Bernie Sanders political revolution continues to live - the fact that they're still paying media minions and fake pollster gurus to tell you Sanders doesn't stand a chance is all the evidence you need to demonstrate he's still in the race and the fight is not over.

As always in life, it's important to "consider the source" and the source of all this anti-Bernie mainstream media coverage are companies owned by rich people who'd rather lose to a fascist like Trump, than share with the labor class under a Democratic Socialist like Sanders.

- Nina Illingworth

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.