The Corporate Media And Their Biased Coverage of Bernie Sanders

Fingers can point in many directions to explain the relatively rapid descent of America into a political morass where an egomaniacal fascist like Donald Trump can be considered a serious candidate for the Presidency — income inequality, the death of the Middle Class, Wall Street greed, the rise of the surveillance state, constant war — but at the top of my list is the corporate media.

President Eisenhower’s warning about the rise of the “military/industrial complex” is heavily cited as a forecast that unfortunately came true, but there arose a third force that Ike did not see at the time that now forms a triumvirate of nightmarish influence over this country, the corporate media.

Owned by a handful of extremely wealthy elitists, the corporate media is the one percent’s propaganda tool used to keep Americans distracted, uninformed and good little consumers. A most recent example of this is the skewed coverage of the candidates running for President by the major news outlets.

According to the Tyndall Report, which tracks stories on the network news programs, between January 1, 2015 and the end of November, ABC “World News Tonight” devoted 81 minutes of coverage to Donald Trump and less than one minute to Bernie Sanders. The report found that all of the major news programs were guilty of Trump overkill with a total of 234 total network minutes for the Donald compared to just 10 minutes of reporting on Sanders. That’s over almost a year period.

There are two reasons for this obvious bias on the part of the mainstream corporate media. First there’s entertainment value. Trump is outrageous, monstrous and a born entertainer. He shocks every time he opens his mouth and that makes for great entertainment (under the guise of news) that viewers eat up, whether their Republicans or Democrats. Sanders, on the other hand, is seen as a crotchety old man and too much of a scold. Boooring.

But there’s a stealthier effort going on here as well. Of all the candidates running for President, none of them represent as big a threat to the elites as Sanders. For all of his insane statements, Trump is one of them, and Sanders is definitely not. Sanders and his Democratic Socialist agenda represent a threat to the status quo, the deep state the ruling elite, and because of this, they want him on television, and exposed to the public, as little as possible.

Just like Time magazine’s failure to make Sanders “Person of the Year” despite his win in the popularity poll, the corporate press will do everything in its power to keep the progressive Democrat in the wings, while giving the howling fascist demagogue Trump center stage.

David Brooks is an Ass

New York Times columnist David Brooks is an ass in both senses of the word; a hole through which noxious waste is routinely emitted and a braying donkey, offending the ears every time he opens his mouth. He is the Washington beltway’s babble-master, wrapping his never-ending defense of elite white men with the eloquence of a Victorian era English professor.

It is no surprise that Brooks detests Bernie Sanders. On Friday night’s PBS NewsHour, Brooks said that Sanders doesn’t understand America’s working class, suburban voters, blacks or Latinos. This from a man so cloistered in his world of white privilege he routinely blames the poor (code for minorities) for being poor, as if they are a subspecies that lacks the correct set of genes to hold down a job that pays more than seven dollars an hour.

Brooks is America’s mouthpiece for the status quo. Sanders is a threat to the status quo. Ergo, Brooks hates Sanders. Not to mention that Sanders is a democratic socialist where Brooks is the champion of laissez-faire capitalism. But for the defender of this country’s rich and powerful to say Sanders doesn’t understand the working class, blacks or Latinos is like Rush Limbaugh saying Obama doesn’t understand what it’s like to be an African American. It’s a claim that is so divorced from reality, and comes from the mouth of a man who routinely characterizes the working class as lazy whiners and blacks or Latinos as moral and intellectual inferiors, that it should make everybody’s head explode.

David Brooks is an ass. In a just world he would be editing recipes for the Daily Shopper, not writing opinion pieces for the New York Times.