Day two on the voyage is Martin Luther King’s Birthday. It’s actually, traditionally, been a service day in Iowa when people go to churches, community centers and the like to volunteer—but campaign events per se are light. Bernie arrives tomorrow in the state for a series of rallies starting in Fort Dodge. I’ll be there.
But, this is worth reading. I spoke to the reporter at length for this article, and he used a snippet but it pretty much says it all: “How the media missed Bernie Sanders”.
Bernie Sanders, the man who is leading in New Hampshire and giving Hillary Clinton a run for her money in Iowa, is coming to terms with a new reality: The media is taking him seriously.
Since launching his campaign last May, Sanders has received vastly less media attention than his chief Democratic opponent, while his chances of becoming the party's nominee were largely dismissed by pundits and commentators — despite the fact that, like a certain senator before him, he draws far larger crowds, boasts a remarkably enthusiastic volunteer base, and, though he doesn't have as much money as Clinton, set an all-time record with more than 2.3 million campaign contributions last year.
Now, with Sanders climbing in the polls two weeks before the Iowa caucuses — and likely to maintain momentum after a strong debate performance on Sunday — the mainstream media is racing to catch up to a phenomenon that has been abundantly clear to backers, donors and the progressive media for nine months.
Clearly, we were not getting coverage that was commensurate with our support among the electorate," Jeff Weaver, Sanders' campaign manager, said during an interview here at Hotel Vermont, where Sanders was preparing for Sunday's debate, the last before the Iowa caucuses on February 1. "Is it a frustration? Of course it's a frustration."
The failure to anticipate Sanders' rise points to a deep flaw with American political media, journalists and campaign strategists told CNN: Despite being proven wrong time and time again, many commentators and reporters continue to cling to an unshakeable faith in the conventional wisdom about the campaign while often ignoring realities on the ground.
And:
Sanders, however, immediately began drawing thousands of supporters, and then tens of thousands, to his rallies. The media acknowledged the large crowds, but the Sanders campaign felt that pundits came up with endless ways to dismiss their importance.
"At every stop, the media had an explanation for why the crowds weren't significant," Weaver said. "5,000 people here? 'Oh, that's Bernie's home city.' New Hampshire, 'Oh, that's next door.' We went to Minneapolis and had 4,000 people -- 'Oh, well, that's the Frost Belt. Frost Belt people like him.' Then we went to Denver, and it was 'college liberals.'"
"Wherever we went, there was always an explanation about why what we were doing seemed to be significant, but really wasn't," Weaver said.
It wasn't that there weren't reporters or cameras at these events, Weaver explained. It was that, very often, none of the coverage showed up on the front page or on television. If you looked to the mainstream media, he said, you would have no idea that Sanders would one day be running even in Iowa or leading New Hampshire.
Weaver noted two exceptions: Local media, which he said did a much better job of focusing on policy over process; and the progressive media — but neither of those could rival the overwhelming national narrative that Sanders was merely an also-ran.
Jonathan Tasini, a Sanders surrogate, called the coverage "a professional failure."
"It's both astonishing and understandable," Tasini said. "The understandable part is, too many journalists are too enthralled with conventional wisdom and establishment thinking. They just repeat things without any notion of what's happening on the ground."
Many reporters, who asked to speak on background so as not to offend their news organizations or their colleagues, agreed.
"Among 'big-time' reporters, there's an almost pathological fear of looking unsophisticated," one veteran political reporter explained. "Journalists are supposed to look 'wised-up' and with it. I think this ingrained tendency often causes us to miss things that should be as plain as the noses on our faces — and that are apparent to 'civilians.'"
Essentially, the entire media establishment failed—grossly. It was professional malfeasance on a grand scale. But for social media, Bernie would have been invisible to voters.
I had more to say which doesn’t appear in the article: Journalists are star-fuckers and so pretty much they just had their eyes blinded by the celebrity of the status quo candidate. To be sure, there were the endless focus on emails and Benghazi but this was perfect for the status quo candidate—journalists chased after what everyone else saw as a scandal, but this was like cotton candy...no real look at the Iraq War vote, health care (until the status quo candidate started spreading disinformation about Bernie’s positions) and on and on.
Journalists are lazy. They don’t read. You say Bernie’s programs will cost $18 trillion over a decade , and, putting aside whether that figure is even accurate, these morons don’t have any context to understand what that number might mean—in an economy that will, over a decade, have a cumulative GDP of roughly $250 trillion. And on and on.
And I’m not even here talking about the complete press release factory out of The New York Times by Clinton informal press secretary Amy Chozick...what an embarrassment. Horrendous “reporting”.