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Is Corporate Media Turning Pro Bernie?
Reflections on Journalistic Bias
Most people think the mainstream media is against their candidate. And in a way they’re right. As we’ll see in a minute, the media can be against any candidate or all candidates. The supporters of Bernie Sanders have long objected that the “corporate media” have drawn a target on Sanders’ back because they’re afraid he’ll overturn the money changers’ tables in the temple of capitalism.
But suddenly (in mid-February 2020) major networks / publishers seem surprisingly positive about Sanders’ campaign.
Politico (which doesn’t typically lean very far left, if left at all) has proclaimed “Bernie breaks out of the pack” in advance of the Nevada primary. And CNN (never very liberal in its skew) has published one of the most positive profiles of a campaign that I’ve seen in decades: “How Bernie Sanders became the Democratic primary’s early front-runner.” The three CNN authors stop just short of saying Sanders can defeat Trump. Not even Jeff Weaver’s email-a-thons are this upbeat.
To make sense of what seems like a bat-turn, we have to understand the goal of media. Media is an organization, and the first goal of any organization is self-preservation. For TV, newspapers, and the web, this means attracting a lucrative enough audience to justify their existence (either through…
