Why It Makes Sense To Refer To Comcast-TV As MSDNC

Bernie wants MSNBC to treat his campaign more fairly. And he's asked the station's top brass to do just that. But maybe that's a mistake. The more unfairly the #NeverTrump Republicans who dominate the MSNBC talking heads team treat Bernie, the higher his polling goes and the more contributions come rolling in. After the New Hampshire primary, Ari Melber-- one of the few MSNBC hosts who is neither a #NeverTrump Republican nor a biased anti-working class bigot-- asked a Democratic voter why she had voted for Bernie and she responded that it was in response to MSNBC's anti-Bernie coverage. "I think that it is completely cynical to say that he's lost 50% of his vote from the last time and there were two candidates," she told Melber. "Now, there are multiple, wonderful candidates who would be great presidents and people that I think we can unify and get behind, but the kind of 'Stop Bernie' cynicism that I've heard from a number of people. I watch MSNBC constantly, so I've heard that from a number of commentators... It made me angry enough, I said, 'Okay, Bernie's got my vote.'"

MSNBC hasn't done an editorial against Bernie per se, but working class supporters find it increasingly hard to watch anti-Bernie hate monsters like Joy Reid. Chris $5 million as year Matthews, or any of the afternoon #NeverTrump Republicans who populate the station's airwaves. On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published a piece by Tom Kludt explaining why Bernie's campaign is sick of MSNBC's coverage.

Faiz Shakir, Bernie's campaign manager went to NBC headquarters to speak with MSNBC president Phil Griffin. Shakir told Kludt that "We watched a ton of terrible coverage occurring and we thought we’d at least try to address it."

For months, the campaign bristled at slights from MSNBC’s stable of hosts and commentators. Jason Johnson, an MSNBC contributor, predicted in January 2019 that Sanders would drop out by August, and network analyst Mimi Rocah said in July that Sanders made her “skin crawl.” On-screen graphics have omitted Sanders and misrepresented his poll numbers, a trend that inspired a sendup from The Onion.

“It’s been a struggle to change the tone and the tenor of the coverage that we receive,” Shakir said in an interview. “They’ve been among the last to acknowledge that Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination is real, and even when it’s become real, they frequently discount it.” (A study from progressive magazine In These Times buttresses Shakir’s critique). Sanders also attended the off-the-record discussion with Griffin; an MSNBC spokesperson said the network has hosted similar meetings with other Democratic candidates. Shakir said the 30 Rock chat was “open” and “cordial,” but now, months later, he’s “not sure it really changed anything.”

Sanders has long contended that the agenda of “corporate media” doesn’t necessarily reflect the people’s needs, and his 2020 campaign has doubled as a rolling media criticism shop. On Twitter, Sanders’s speechwriter David Sirota, a veteran reporter, has become a one-man rapid-response machine; last week, he chided a New York Times reporter for downplaying Sanders’s victory in the New Hampshire primary. Several key campaign figures hail from the media’s left flank: deputy campaign manager Ari Rabin-Havt (Media Matters), national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray (The Intercept), and Shakir (ThinkProgress). Sanders himself has suggested that the Washington Post “doesn’t write particularly good articles about” him because of his efforts to raise the minimum wage at Amazon, the company founded by the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. He’s also railed against networks taking Big Pharma ads while on the debate stage.

Entering Wednesday’s debate in Las Vegas, which will be cohosted by MSNBC and NBC News, the ongoing tension between the titular liberal cable news network and the current Democratic front-runner has only intensified, and appears symptomatic of generational and ideological rifts within the party. It is at once a test of both MSNBC’s influence over the process and Sanders’s ability to withstand establishment resistance. Shakir said unflattering coverage on MSNBC has been “actively damaging” to the campaign. “The constant diminishment of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC,” he added, “hurts his case for electability.”

Sanders’s legion of very online supporters are quick to share clips and gripes after any perceived slight against Sanders. The anti-Bernie highlight reel grew in recent weeks, with some moments verging on parody. Joy Reid hosted a body-language expert who said Sanders’s posture revealed that he was “lying” about a recent dispute with Elizabeth Warren. Chris Matthews’s appearances, meanwhile, have become appointment viewing for his anguished warnings about Sanders. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, a glum Matthews invoked the ghost of George McGovern in forecasting a wipeout for Sanders in the general election. “Bernie Sanders is not going to be president of the United States, okay?” Matthews declared. Following the most recent debate in New Hampshire, Matthews breathlessly offered another history lesson. “I have my own views of the word socialist and I’d be glad to share them…They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War,” Matthews said. “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?”

While Matthews’s rant was mostly met with mockery, there was anger last week when Chuck Todd quoted a story from a conservative publication on-air that described Sanders supporters as a “digital brown-shirt brigade,” prompting a condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League. (Todd will be one of five moderators at Wednesday’s debate.) And despite his newly minted status as the party’s national front-runner, Sanders has continued to face skepticism about his viability. The real story out of New Hampshire, Lawrence O’Donnell said, was “how much ground [Sanders has] lost from four years ago,” when he won the state’s primary in a decidedly smaller field than this year. “I don’t understand how Bernie is considered a front-runner,” Todd said after Sanders’s primary win.

...When we spoke Friday, Shakir was clearly frustrated by what he saw as a mix of dismissiveness and disparagement toward his candidate. He bemoaned a “double standard” in which the campaign faces relentless scrutiny over its most vocal online supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, while MSNBC pundits have impunity to knock the candidate or his base. “You can feel the disdain they have for Bernie Sanders’s supporters,” Shakir said. “It’s a condescending attitude: ‘Oh, they must not be that intelligent. They’re being deluded. They’re being conned. They’re all crazy Twitter bots.’ My view is that there’s a bit of detachment from MSNBC and the people who this campaign gets support from. It feels like they’re covering progressives from an elitist perspective.”

Shakir credited CNN for making “efforts to try and diversify their voices,” citing the network’s hire of Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of the progressive organization Justice Democrats and a veteran of the 2016 Sanders campaign. Even Fox News has been “more fair than MSNBC,” according to Shakir. “That’s saying something,” he said. “Fox is often yelling about Bernie Sanders’s socialism, but they’re still giving our campaign the opportunity to make our case in a fair manner, unlike MSNBC, which has credibility with the left and is constantly undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign.”

Still, Sanders has made his own case several times on MSNBC, sitting down with Rachel Maddow earlier in the race and appearing last week on Chris Hayes’s show. His campaign surrogates get airtime too. On the night before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders campaign cochair Nina Turner accused Michael Bloomberg of being an oligarch trying to buy his way into the election. Johnson, the MSNBC contributor, disputed Turner’s characterization as “dismissive” and “unfair.”

A spokesperson for MSNBC declined to respond to Shakir’s specific critiques, but the network has previously brushed off complaints from Sanders as just another case of a campaign working the refs for more favorable coverage. “A presidential campaign complaining about tough questions and commentary speaks for itself,” a spokesperson for MSNBC told the Daily Beast in July. “Our anchors and analysts are doing their jobs: discussing day-to-day developments that have an impact on the race.”

...MSNBC’s coverage is also a microcosm of the generational split that Sanders faces in the primary. While Sanders cleans up among young Democratic voters, the 78-year-old fares poorly among his own age cohort (which also more closely mirrors the cable news audience). Voters aged 65 and older were shaped by the Cold War, leaving many wary of the ”socialist” label that Sanders embraces, and they were scarred by McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972. They are more contemporaries and ideological peers of Matthews, and theirs-- not Sanders’s-- is the predominant point of view heard among MSNBC’s center-left pundits.

“There’s a reason the network is mocked as MSDNC: because it’s long been little more than an arm of the party’s establishment apparatus,” said Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who had appeared as an MSNBC guest before becoming a staunch critic. MSNBC is “not some news organization with an anti-Sanders bias,” Greenwald said, but rather “a full-scale disinformation machine serving the primary goal of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]: destroying the Sanders campaign at any cost.”

Greenwald pointed to Hayes as an exception to his critique; Shakir also said the prime-time host “has been generally good” in his coverage of the campaign. Anand Giridharadas, a political analyst for MSNBC, has also been one of the few commentators to push back against the network’s criticism of Sanders. But identifying a Sanders sympathizer on MSNBC’s roster is reminiscent of “Where’s Waldo?” MSNBC hasn’t gone the route of CNN, which loaded up on pro-Donald Trump pundits like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski during the 2016 race and beyond because its existing stable of conservative analysts were largely critical of the Republican insurgent.

Oh... and by the way... I just couldn't resist.