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NY Times, March 9, 2020
What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About the Media
By Ben Smith
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 apologized. We weren’t really doing that,
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,
Vt., he turned to his staff and said: “We can’t survive. We have to
develop our own media.”
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, Mr. 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 Ms. 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 mobilize 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 Mr. Sanders
and the radical provocateur Abbie Hoffman. Mr. Sanders complained that
Vermont’s television stations had been “prostituted by commercials.”
(The video is a trip, and worth the click.)
His main point: “The media itself is as important a political issue as
exists.”
Mr. 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 Mr. Sanders’s 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 Mr. Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of
France, Mr. Sanders’s supporters began a drumbeat of criticism that
helped lead to Mr. 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.
“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 Mr. Sanders
— and really any politician who is hostile, or even cranky, to the media
— is following in President Trump’s footsteps.
It’s a canard. Mr. 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. Mr. Trump
wants to control that media, and to discredit competing voices. Mr.
Sanders wants to remake the media in a new model.
“Trump knew how to weaponize 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.
Ms. Ball’s morning show for The Hill website is one of a handful of
signs that the media landscape is beginning to shift in Mr. Sanders’s
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, Mr. Trump’s former campaign adviser, who in
an interview described Ms. 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.”
On Friday morning in their chilly Washington studio, over a
standard-issue cable news glass table, hosts and guests denounced blind
support for female candidates as “lady boss yass queen feminism” and
sneered at “woke tokenism.”
It’s a kind of anti-establishment “Crossfire” aimed at “hating each
other as American people less — and hating the elites more,” as Ms. Ball
put it.
The other outlet seeking to fill the space where “the Trump and Bernie
person meet” is Vice, the new television chief, Morgan Hertzan, told me.
He says he’s remaking the company’s channel (formerly known as Viceland)
based on research that shows there’s a news audience alienated from
“corporate media.”
The goal is to create an outsider’s network in stark contrast to MSNBC’s
inside conversation. Mr. Hertzan said the network was recruiting top
progressives to host a new wave of shows and developing a weekly program
with Anand Giridharadas, an MSNBC enfant terrible whose book, “Winners
Take All,” denounces self-serving billionaire philanthropists.
Mr. Giridharadas said he wanted to make TV that is a rebuke to cable
news as it now exists. “When you get to that level of television,
everyone is prosperous at the table,” he said in an interview. “I’m not
sure I’ve ever sat next to an uninsured person on television. I sit next
to uninsured people on the subway all the time.”
Vice and The Hill are not, in fact, socialist institutions. They are
companies on the shaky edge of big American media. Their programming
choices, echoing the YouTube success of companies like the The Young
Turks and a handful of independent outlets, more likely mark the
beginning of a new generation’s dissent getting slickly packaged and
sold to the mainstream.
Vice will struggle with the decidedly old media problem of how to get
cord-cutters to watch a cable channel. But Vice’s research, from the
expensive strategy firm Magid, found what populists everywhere are
discovering: Angry outsiderism is a growth industry. The new Vice
mantra, Mr. Hertzan said, is, “The everything system is broken — let’s
fix it together.”
Mr. Sanders has his own plan for the media revolution. He wants to break
up big media and tech conglomerates, increase funding for public media
and empower journalist unions. An adviser, Robert McChesney, said in an
interview that Mr. Sanders is “open to” the more radical idea of having
the federal government provide a $200 “citizenship news voucher” to all
Americans, who would then use the voucher to support public media
outlets of their choosing.
While Mr. Sanders’s criticism of the media has more merit than most
reporters like to acknowledge, the media has often gotten Mr. Sanders
right, too. His weaknesses, from a rigid attachment to the battles of an
earlier generation to his struggle to persuade older black Democrats to
join his revolution, aren’t media inventions. They’re good, fair stories.
And in 2020, far more than in 2016, the media has also captured his
strengths: his consistency, his commitment to the poor, his deep
popularity with young people. A top supporter of Mr. Sanders, New York’s
mayor, Bill de Blasio, offered an explanation for that in an interview.
Capitalist ownership or not, the mayor said, “There are plenty of
journalists who are class traitors.”
Ben Smith is the media columnist. He joined The Times in 2020 after
eight years as founding editor in chief of BuzzFeed News. Before that,
he covered politics for Politico, The New York Daily News, The New York
Observer and The New York Sun. Email: ben.sm...@nytimes.com @benyt
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