What Bernie Sanders Gets Right About the Media

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/08/business/media/bernie-sanders-media.html

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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.”