I have watched for the past couple months as Bernie Sanders has risen in the polls and then proceeded to do well in the first primary and caucuses as these people have done everything to try and kneecap his success. The amount of negative press about Sanders that has been pumped out by all of the mainstream “liberal” media during this period of time is truly breathtaking. They don’t make any effort whatsoever to disguise their biases which is really ironic when they have all been prescribing themselves as the necessary antidote to the alternate reality the Trump administration is trying to create.
There is no problem with journalism examining candidates. That is why their viewers and readers turn to those outlets. The problem is that they have collectively targeted one candidate in this primary competition and chosen to smear him mercilessly. A truthful press requires objective, unbiased opinions. The deluge of anti-Sanders propaganda from all forms of the mainstream media (print/web/TV) has proven that they lack such an impartiality.
It is not surprising that most of the media is anti-Sanders; they are either corporations themselves or owned by corporations or venture capital. Sanders’ policy proposals threaten to put an end to the “no-taxes for corporate America” scheme that has been getting progressively worse with each administration since Reagan. It’s also not surprising to hear it from the people who are paid to talk on the TV set or write the hit-pieces because a lot of them are Republicans themselves. What is surprising, though, is to observe the audience that has been so critical these past three years about the propaganda on Fox News (and the Trump supporters who buy into it) fall into the same trap.
There has been a really great grift they have perpetrated on their casual viewers and readers since the Trump election. It’s essentially a bait and switch that deceives them into believing that because they share one common enemy all their views must line up. They have used the notion that since the Never-Trump Republicans (getting paid to share their opinions on “liberal” cable news) don’t like Trump, and the liberals tuning in don’t like Trump, that they should share the same opinions on who the Democratic Party should nominate to go against Trump.
The great irony of this is that there is a whole audience of liberal TV viewers who are listening to George W. Bush, McCain, etc. advisers and strategists giving them advice about which Democrat can win and lose an election against Trump. These people would have told you that Jeb was going to be the nominee in 2016, and they would have worked hard to help him beat Hillary, you can be certain of that. The whole reason they are on the TV set is because they were wrong and their candidates lost after which they publicly opposed the Dear Leader. Now they are the 6% of Republicans that don’t support Trump and the notion is that we need to appeal to them?!
There is a whole group of liberals, or people who used to be liberal, who are being deceptively turned into neocons by a bunch of Republican pundits spreading their poison through the media. This can be best observed following the results of the SC primary, and as a lifelong Democrat it is frightening to see. The take-away from this is that the enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend. Such is true about these hucksters, who might share a mutual disdain for Donald Trump, but they almost certainly love his policies and all the judges he has been able to nominate. They are not on our side.
Following the SC Primary there has been a return to totally delusional and disingenuous analysis of the democratic primary. (They had to bite their tongues for a moment post-NV) Everyone reading this knows that Joe Biden won the primary by a large margin and Sanders came in second. This victory by Biden has given these newsrooms the license to move the goalposts yet again to push another phony message. From one of the perennial bad actors, the New York Times, there was this notification sent out: “Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary, reviving his campaign and establishing himself as a leading rival to Bernie Sanders.” From another, Politico, there was this: “Joe Biden racked up his first 2020 win in South Carolina’s Democratic primary, a big boost heading into Super Tuesday.”
Those stories were blasted out within 3-5 minutes of the polls closing on Saturday evening. There were no actual numbers other than exit polls at the time indicating Biden had won but they wanted to get that message out pronto. An exit poll isn’t official; it is simply an extrapolation of data gathered, often by news outlets, from voters as they leave polling stations. When the ballots were actually tallied Biden did have a big win, but this is proof that these outlets had these stories locked and loaded before a single vote had actually been counted.
Getting into the nitty-gritty about the results and the race overall the fake news gets even worse. As evident in both those messages, they were pushing the message that Biden had revived his campaign from winning in the state where he put all his resources. In an apparent nod to the Hillary contingent, they pushed the storyline that he had won more of the combined popular vote from the first four races than anyone else.
The argument about Biden having the most votes is the epitome of illusory; his SC win is the only reason he holds the largest share of the popular vote. It’s deceitful because its sole purpose is to imply that he is the most popular candidate but the win in SC accounts for 80% of his share of the popular vote. If he were the most popular candidate, then he would have done well in all of the first four states. He didn’t. It is supremely duplicitous when contrasted with the argument they have made since last winter that Sanders doesn’t have broad appeal.
Here is the reality — Biden came in fourth place in the Iowa Caucuses, finishing 11% points behind Sanders, who won the popular vote and tied for the state delegate equivalents. In NH he finished in 5th place, 17% points behind Sanders. In Nevada he came in 2nd place, finishing 27% points behind Bernie Sanders. In Nevada, not only did he have the backing of the state Democratic Party and his friend Harry Reid shilling for him, he had the benefit of the most powerful union in the state attacking Sanders’ trademark policy in the weeks before the primary. Even with all of those things working in Biden’s favor, Bernie Sanders still won by 27% points.
As you can see there, Biden’s results in those three different states were 4th, 5th, and 2nd. As I write this, there are still 50 states in our union and 5 inhabited territories and having broad appeal means doing well in more than one place. Not to take anything away from Biden, he won South Carolina by a wide margin, but Sanders tied for first in Iowa in delegate count and won the popular vote, won in NH and NV, and came in 2nd in SC. Overall that signifies a much broader appeal by the pundit’s own rubric.
What really signifies Sanders’ broad appeal, though, is the grassroots movement behind his candidacy. There hasn’t been anything like it in modern American political history. This is truly where the brainwashing from the corporate media shows its greatest impact. There is a large cohort of people out there who genuinely still believe that he has limited appeal because that is what they are being told in their media echo chamber. These are a lot of the same “resisters” who called Fox News a feedback loop of misinformation for the past three years.
The Sanders campaign sent out an email this morning revealing that they had received “more than $46.5 million from 2.2 million individual donations” in the 29 days of February. There is no analog to that in the American political sphere. No one else has that power to raise money in small dollar donations from individuals all over the country. No one else has that type of movement. I can promise you that every political candidate wishes that they had the fundraising ability that Sanders has. Those donations signify actual individuals donating their hard-earned dollars to support a candidate because they believe in that person.
In addition to that financial support, people are flying to states to canvass in support of Sanders, and people who can’t afford to contribute from their paychecks are making phone calls and canvassing locally. Biden can’t even get enough people to volunteer to canvass for him. There is a serious disconnect between the people that believe this drivel they read and watch and the political movement that is happening on the left.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise, I guess, since they are watching the same networks that are responsible for giving us Donald Trump. While they watch former Republicans and Hillary strategists now blaming Bernie, they seem to forget that these people blamed James Comey, Jill Stein, Russian Interference, and so on for her losing. Meanwhile they are feeding the beast that is responsible for the whole thing — the mainstream media.
Trump probably would have lost because while he did have a base of supporters, they weren’t politically active and didn’t contribute much to his campaign. That didn’t matter, though, because he received over $3 billion worth of free media coverage and some estimates are as high as $5 billion. So please, liberals, go ahead and keep watching the networks that created the monster where they constantly try and kneecap the only guy with the movement to beat Trump.
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Phelonious Crunk | Radio Free (2020-03-06T23:48:50+00:00) The Fallacy of the Appeal of the Centrist Democrat. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/03/06/the-fallacy-of-the-appeal-of-the-centrist-democrat/
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