Jesus Was Not A Centrist-- In Fact Almost No One Who Accomplished Anything Worthwhile Was

Make America Great Again-- But For Real This Time

Basically, Bernie began his career fighting for working families. Biden began his fighting for segregation. Last week an Ipsos poll for Reuters asked Democratic primary voters who was best in a series of issues Democrats are considering using to help guide them to a candidate to face Trump next year. Relevant results:

• Health care

Bernie- 27%
Status Quo Joe- 17%
Elizabeth- 12%
Mayo- 5%

• Environment

Bernie- 22%
Elizabeth- 13%
Status Quo Joe- 12%
Mayo- 6%

• Economy/Jobs

Bernie- 22%
Status Quo Joe- 18%
Elizabeth- 14%
Mayo- 5%

• Immigration

Bernie- 18%
Status Quo Joe- 17%
Elizabeth- 10%
Mayo- 7%

• Strong Progressive

Bernie- 24%
Elizabeth- 17%
Status Quo Joe- 13%
Mayo- 7%

• A new and difference voice

Bernie- 18%
Elizabeth- 18%
Mayo-n 15%
Status Quo Joe- 10%

• Most likely to beat Trump

Status Quo Joe- 31%
Bernie- 17%
Elizabeth- 10%
Mayo- 4%

So Bernie’s the favorite to be the nominee, right? Not the favorite of the media or punditocracy. And when you ask those same voters who they would vote for it. The election were today...

• Status Quo Joe- 25%
• Bernie- 19%
• Elizabeth- 13%
• Mayo- 6%
• Bloomberg- 6%
• Yang- 3%

And actual match-ups with all voters-- not just Democrats-- show Biden beating Trump 39-35% (plus 4), Bernie beating him 40-36% (plus 4), Elizabeth beating him 38-36% (plus 2), Bloomberg beating him 36-35% (plus 1) and Mayo losing to him 36-35% (minus 1). Something’s wrong here. And David Leonhardt tried tackling this disconnect for his NY Times readers this week: How ‘Centrist Bias’ Hurts Sanders And Warren. Leonrardt looked at his colleagues in the media. He started with former Washington Post political editor-- more recently a founder of insistently centrist website, Politico-- John Harris. “Last month, Harris wrote a column that I can’t get out of my head. In it, he argued that political journalism suffers from ‘centrist bias.’ As he explained, ‘This bias is marked by an instinctual suspicion of anything suggesting ideological zealotry, an admiration for difference-splitting, a conviction that politics should be a tidier and more rational process than it usually is.’”

The bias caused much of the media to underestimate Ronald Reagan in 1980 and Donald Trump in 2016. It also helps explain the negative tone running through a lot of the coverage of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders this year.

Centrist bias, as I see it, confuses the idea of centrism (which is very much an ideology) with objectivity and fairness. It’s an understandable confusion, because American politics is dominated by the two major parties, one on the left and one on the right. And the overwhelming majority of journalists at so-called mainstream outlets-- national magazines, newspapers, public radio, the non-Fox television networks-- really are doing their best to treat both parties fairly.

In doing so, however, they often make an honest mistake: They equate balance with the midpoint between the two parties’ ideologies. Over the years, many press critics have pointed out one weakness of this approach: false equivalence, the refusal to consider the possibility that one side of an argument is simply (or mostly) right.

But that’s not the only problem. There’s also the possibility that both political parties have been wrong about something and that the solution, rather than being roughly halfway between their answers, is different from what either has been proposing.

This seemingly radical possibility turns out to be quite common, as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.-- author of the classic book, The Vital Center, no less-- pointed out. The abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor rights, the New Deal, civil rights for black Americans, Reagan’s laissez-faire revolution and same-sex marriage all started outside the boundaries of what either party favored. “The most consequential history,” Harris wrote, “is usually not driven by the center.”

Political and economic journalism too often assumes otherwise and treats the center as inherently sensible. This year’s Democratic presidential campaign has been a good case study. The skeptical questions posed to the more moderate Democrats are frequently about style or tactics: Are you too old? Too young? Too rich? Too far behind in the polls?

The skeptical questions for the more progressive candidates, Sanders and Warren, often challenge the substance of their ideas: Are you too radical? Are you being realistic? And, by golly, how would you pay for it all?

I recently took a detailed look through the coverage of the wealth tax, favored by both Sanders and Warren, and centrist bias seeps through much of it. The coverage has slanted negative, filled with the worries that centrists have — that the tax wouldn’t work in practice or would slow economic growth.

Experts who favor a wealth tax, like Gene Sperling, Felicia Wong and Heather Boushey, or whose academic research suggests it would work, like Lily Batchelder and David Kamin, have received less attention than experts who don’t like the idea. For that matter, the complaints of obscure billionaires have gotten more attention than the arguments of sympathetic experts. “Billionaire whining about a wealth tax,” as Ilyana Kuziemko, a Princeton economist who’s sympathetic to a wealth tax, told me, mostly isn’t newsworthy.

I’m not suggesting that journalists lather the wealth tax with praise. There are real questions about it, and journalists are supposed to be skeptical. I’m also not suggesting that Sanders or Warren is necessarily the best nominee. As regular readers know, I’m a moderate on Medicare, immigration and college debt, among other subjects. John Harris, for his part, confesses to “a pretty strong bout” of centrist bias.

But maybe that’s why we recognize it and pine for more objective coverage. Not every policy question posed to Democrats needs to have a conservative assumption, and not every question posed to Republicans needs to have a liberal one. If Warren and Sanders are going to be asked whether their solutions go too far, Joe Biden should be asked whether his solutions are too timid: Mr. Vice President, many economists believe that inequality is bad for an economy, so are you doing enough to attack inequality?

Once you start thinking about centrist bias, you recognize a lot of it. It helps explain why the 2016 presidential debates focused more on the budget deficit, a topic of centrist zealotry, than climate change, almost certainly a bigger threat. (Well-funded deficit advocacy plays a role too.) Centrist bias also helps explain the credulousness of early coverage during the Iraq and Vietnam wars. Both Democrats and Republicans, after all, largely supported each war.

The world is more surprising and complicated than centrist bias imagines it to be. Sometimes, people like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are right. Even when they’re not, they deserve the same skepticism that other politicians do-- no less, no more.

Mostly they're right. And one thing we know for sure... the rightists and corporatists and net-libs never are. So... how about a Christmas gift for a Jewish boy from Brooklyn who's been right about everything and torn apart by a biased media day in and day out for decades and decades and now most of all?

Norman Solomon put it slightly more… directly this week. “For the United States,” he wrote, “oligarchy is the elephant-- and donkey-- in the room. Only one candidate for president is willing to name it. Out of nearly 25,000 words spoken during the Democratic debate last Thursday night, the word ‘oligarchy’ was heard once. ‘We are living in a nation increasingly becoming an oligarchy,’ Bernie Sanders said, ‘where you have a handful of billionaires who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying elections and politicians.’ Sanders gets so much flak from corporate media because his campaign is upsetting the dominant apple cart. He relentlessly exposes a basic contradiction: A society ruled by an oligarchy-- defined as ‘a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes’-- can’t really be a democracy. The super-wealthy individuals and huge corporations that own the biggest U.S. media outlets don’t want actual democracy. It would curb their profits and their power.”

Over the weekend, the Washington Post editorialized that the agendas of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren “probably would fail at the polls and, if not, would carry extreme risks if they tried to implement them.” The editorial went on to praise “the relative moderates in the race”-- Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar-- for “offering a more positive future.”

…The Washington Post‘s routinely negative treatment of Sanders, which became notorious during his 2016 presidential run, remains symptomatic of what afflicts mass-media coverage of his current campaign-- from editorial pages and front pages to commercial TV news and “public” outlets like the PBS NewsHour and NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

…Right now, two corporate Democrats are the leading contenders to maintain corrupted business-as-usual at the top of the party. As the executive director of Our Revolution, Joseph Geevarghese, aptly put it days ago, “Almost every problem facing our country-- from runaway greed on Wall Street, to high prescription drug prices, to locking kids in private detention facilities, to our failure to act against the climate crisis—can be traced back to the influence of the kind of donors fueling Pete Buttigieg and Joe Biden’s campaigns for president.”

While uttering standard platitudes along the lines of making the rich and corporations “pay their fair share,” you won’t hear Buttigieg or Biden use the word “oligarchy.” That’s because, to serve the oligarchy, they must pretend it doesn’t exist.

Media Bias Against Progressives-- The Story Of Politico

Politico reporters, Sarah Ferris and Andrew Desiderio, presented a webinar Friday in how to please corporate media ownership and upper management by hammering how conservative talking points. The name of their Republican Party message lesson-- which was (seriously) sent out by the NRCC communications department-- is Swing-district Dems face blowback from progressive voters. The first and easiest lesson-- and the most common-place one among Beltway journalists is to refer to conservative Democrats as "moderates," making it seem like mainstream Democrats with widely and overwhelmingly popular ideas are extremists or radicals. That id always a must at Politico, but also used by most Washington Post and NY Times reporters and editors as well.

There was a time when conservative media would always refer to Social Security, the minimum wage, Medicare, the right of workers to organize into union, emancipation of the slaves, the right of women to vote, consumer protection, etc as extreme and radical, socialist and communist. A third of the population of the American colonies in the late 1770s opposed the Revolution and preferred the British monarchy. Many fought on the side of the British and many left the U.S. after the Revolution, skipping out to Canada, the West Indies and the motherland. Unfortunately, they didn't all leave and, worse yet, some of them returned. You'll have to ask Sarah and Andrew-- who referred to opposing Medicare-for-All (i.e., original Medicare) and the Green New Deal (which could be called saving the planet and humanity) as "dodging his party’s leftward drift-- what their antecedents were doing at the time.

They were upset that conservative Democrat Conor Lamb (PA) was approached by constituents asking him to back original Medicare (which includes revolutionary ideas like dental care and hearing aids) and saving the planet and humanity. They called the bills "some of the most liberal legislation the House has ever seen," which didn't include the attribution of the NRCC or RNC or NRSC, which use the phrase daily. "Liberal suburban voters, wrote Ferris and Desiderio, "including in swing districts like Lamb’s, are turning out in droves at town halls to complain about Congress’s inaction on their progressive wish list-- even as their representatives remain firmly in the centrist column. It highlights the quandary the vulnerable Democrats find themselves in: Remain moderate enough to appeal to the middle but risk the ire of the invigorated progressives." (At least they only implied "socialists" and didn't say it)-- though when the NRCC sent their handiwork out within 3 seconds of publication, the subject line was "socialists come for vulnerable Democrats."

Look at all these commies ruing the Politico owners' day: "At public events this week, freshmen in battleground districts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California heard from voters clamoring for Medicare for All, drastic climate action, gun control and the impeachment of President Donald Trump, among other priorities. And it’s not just sign-holding, T-shirt clad activists coming to the mics: It’s white-haired men in golf polos, and moms in work dresses and heels."

Heels no less! Gun control. There's a radical idea-- one that around 90% of non-Politico employees back! "But the freshman centrist also rejected calls to back Medicare for All from at least a half-dozen constituents-- a move that’s been repeated by many other moderates, though it frustrates some in their own base who are growing restless on the bigger issues. 'We have a lot of work to do on health care, there’s no doubt about it,' Lamb told a middle-aged nurse this week who urged him to support the bill. 'I happen to think the issue of prescription drug prices is the alligator closest to the boat, the one we absolutely have to deal with in this Congress.' Lamb, instead, said most people in the district are 'pretty happy' with their current insurance plans. Later in the night, he took another swipe at the ever-growing scope of the bill, and at 2020 candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders: 'It seems like each time Sen. Sanders introduces it, he adds another thing.' True, Bernie added mental health care-- obviously important for Lamb's moron constituents who believe they are "pretty happy" being ripped off by the current insurance system.

New Jersey Blue Dog Mikie Sherrill, they wrote "also faced an intense push for Medicare for All, impeachment and robust climate action, with many people in the room applauding loudly each time a progressive issue was raised. When Democrats voted for her in 2018, they had idea of what a bag of Republican-lite garbage they were getting. She sure didn't tell them. And all the Republicans said about her is that she's a socialist. Unfortunately, she wasn't. At her town hall, she "turned down multiple requests to co-sponsor the Medicare for All bill, to visible disappointment in the crowd. 'Right now, I think it's critical that we bring down health care costs and get everybody covered. That is my goal,' Sherrill said, who made it clear she understood the pain of rising drug prices and insurance bills with stories about her own families’ costly treatments." She doesn't understand anything. She's a hack who deserves to lose her seat. Unfortunately she has no primary opponent yet.

Even swing-district Democrats who have embraced the progressive agenda, like Rep. Mike Levin of California, are coming home to voters who are irked by the stalled progress. Many are pivoting to McConnell, turning him into the boogeyman in 2020 for his so-called “legislative graveyard.”

That must confused every single Politico employee. I mean what sense does that make?!?!

“[Voters] say, why isn’t the House doing more? Well, we are. We are moving forward. It’s the Senate, and it’s Mitch McConnell specifically that’s unwilling to do his job,” he added. “They didn’t run for positions as a United States senator so that they could watch Mitch McConnell block all of the legislation that we send them.”

With control of just one chamber, Democrats have also struggled to make progress on even on the least contentious of their campaign promises, like drug pricing and infrastructure. That puts a strain on the dozens of freshmen like Levin and Lamb who clawed back their seats from the GOP last fall, largely campaigning on local and pocketbook issues.

But key parts of the base are also keen to show Democrats they’re more interested in fighting Trump than simply trying to fix potholes.

Democratic Party bosses, they say, are still playing it safe on the more divisive issues that are reenergizing voters on the left — an attempt to hold onto a “big tent” base in 2020 and protect vulnerable members like Lamb and Levin without alienating increasingly vocal progressives.

That’s a tough task, especially as trademark ideas, like Medicare for All, have gained prominence with help from a more-liberal-than-ever field of 2020 presidential candidates.

The tone of the town halls is far from the scathing public showdowns of the post-2010 Obamacare era. Still, the events this week drew standing room-only crowds in some cases, with dozens of people looking to take the mic and occasionally prompting outbursts of “impeach now!” or “Moscow Mitch.”

Levin has embraced many of the agenda items progressive voters are pushing. Still, the California freshman was confronted over his support for a Senate-passed humanitarian aid package for migrants at the southern border, which most Democrats opposed over concerns it didn’t go far enough.

Politico is careful to never refer to the concentration camps as concentration camps. And, yes, voters are angry that Democrats like Pelosi and Levin voted to fund the concentration camps which plenty of grassroots Democrats were horrified by. Levin, who is Jewish, noted that he has criticized members of both parties for anti-Semitic remarks... Like when Trump said their were very fine people on both sides in Charlottesville, the anti-racists and the Nazis. Both sides.

Balls by Nancy Ohanian

Is There A Worse Political Reporter Than Sydney Ember Anywhere? Spoiler: No

Actual enemy of the people

Every now and then, I mention that this Belway reporter or that Beltway reporter is really nothing but a piece of runny dog shit. Sydney Ember is one of those and when I started writing about what a worthless scumbag she was I thought she was a he. It's hard to get away with calling a woman a worthless scumbag-- even if she obviously is one-- but no one objects much when it's a male. Now that I know Sydney is a woman, I have to think of new ways to describe her worthlessness. Katie Halper did a good job of describing one of the NY Times most anti-progressive fake reporters in a new piece for FAIR, Sydney Ember’s Secret Sources. Halper's piece is basically about a prejudiced journalist passing off her opinions as news. "NYT reporter hides corporate ties of Sanders critics she highlights," wrote Halper. "Ember has a problem with Bernie Sanders-- which may be why the paper has her cover him."

Journalist Skip Kaltenheuser wondered how, "with such a stacked deck against him, Bernie has the ability to keep punching. What has happened to The Times' editors that they accept this sort of propaganda rot off the editorial pages? I can’t imagine it doesn’t infuriate those Times reporters who still care about their integrity. Katie Halper’s article on Ember ought to be on the shelf next to Thomas Frank’s Swat Team."

"Ember," wrote Halper, "is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament, history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’ documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and reporters alike."

The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up:  It changed the headline (from “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,” to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories”); deleted a positive quote from a campaign advisor; and added two negative paragraphs. Even after the paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they “thought [the article]  should say more about his realistic chances.” In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’ viability and ability to govern, in other words.

Ember came to the New York Times with a resumé limited to the finance industry: She was an analyst for BlackRock, the biggest global investment management corporation, and the largest investor in coal plant developers in the world. (Her husband, Mike Bechek, is also in the investment business; he was a senior associate consultant at Bain Capital, where his father was CEO.)

Bechek and Ember

Ember was hired by the Times in 2014 to cover advertising and marketing for the paper’s business vertical Dealbook. She started covering politics in May 2018, and immediately got the enviable assignment of covering one of the leading contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination.

Ember has a multi-prong approach to undermining Sanders: She went to great lengths to avoid calling him the frontrunner until he was “no longer” one;  she attributes his political positions to attention-getting, self-serving ulterior motives; frames even his victories and the popularity of his ideas as weaknesses; cherry-picks polls; presents opinions as facts (claiming he’s “outflanked on the left by rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Beto O’Rourke”); and creates false equivalency between Sanders and Donald Trump.

But for the sake of time and length, this piece focuses on her selection and misrepresentation of sources, which have already drawn scrutiny. Brad Johnson, a political analyst with a background in climate science pointed out that Ember quoted a source without mentioning that she’s a corporate lobbyist; journalist Zaid Jilani noted that Ember failed to disclose that another source was a senior advisor for a Hillary Clinton Super PAC. Education scholar Diane Ravitch devoted a blog post to the reporter’s “shameful” reporting on Sanders’ education policy, questioning the authority of her sources.

Ember’s articles on Sanders (sometimes co-written with other Times reporters) often quote as neutral authorities individuals who are on the other side of a wide ideological divide, with longstanding antipathies to Sanders’ left socioeconomic perspective. Moreover, many of these “experts” are corporate lobbyists, whose work in a particular area is not guided by academic, journalistic or other professional standards, but by the economic and political interests of their clients. Ember spins the identity of her authorities, who are themselves professional spinners.

Consider Ember’s March 1 article, which opened with the kind of unflattering headline her stories often bear: “Bernie Sanders Is Making Changes for 2020, but His Desire for Control Remains.” (Headlines, of course, are chosen by editors, not reporters, but in these stories they reflect the slant of the text.) The piece ended on a typically ominous note: “Even if Mr. Sanders does talk more about himself, his competition presents a new set of challenges that his own biography may only compound,” Ember wrote. She brings in an expert to prove her point: “‘At the end of the day, he is still an old white man,’ said Tracy Sefl, a veteran Democratic strategist.”

Sefl is hardly a disinterested authority; she’s a paid political consultant and media specialist who worked as a surrogate and senior advisor for Hillary Clinton. Other outlets mention Sefl’s experience working for Clinton when they cite her, including the New York Times, which has identified her as someone “supporting Mrs. Clinton,” someone who “worked for Mrs. Clinton,” and a “Democratic consultant and Hillary Rodham Clinton supporter.”

A New York Times story (10/22/07) on the 2008 Clinton campaign’s relationship with the right-wing Drudge Report identified Sefl as someone “who has established a friendly working relationship with Mr. Drudge-- and through whom Mrs. Clinton’s campaign often worked quietly to open a line of communication.” The paper also noted that her “fingerprints are usually impossible to spot.” Sefl admitted in an interview (Chicago, 7/13/15):

My solo consultancy doesn’t have a name, quite purposely so. I do often collaborate with other consultants, including Republicans—within reason—when the work warrants it.

Reporter Zaid Jilani caught Ember’s omission, tweeting that she didn’t “note [Sefl] was senior adviser to Ready for Hillary Super PAC or that she was a hired gun at a Republican-led firm Navigators Global.” The piece has since been updated-- without notice-- to describe Sefl as “a veteran Democratic strategist and formerly a senior adviser to the Super PAC Ready for Hillary.”

Sefl’s choice of phrase, “an old white man,” is surely a crude description for someone who, as he has explained, has a strong Jewish identity, shaped in part by his father’s side of the family having been “wiped out” in the Holocaust, and growing up a working-class Jew in Brooklyn. If successful, Sanders would be the first Jewish president of the United States. But Sefl’s dismissive description is consistent with the way Clinton campaign loyalists and much of corporate media continue to weaponize identity politics against Sanders, erasing not only his Jewish identifty, but also his anti-racist record and his supporters of color.

Ember’s February 17 article, “Bernie Sanders Stumbled With Black Voters in 2016. Can He Do Better in 2020?,” published two days before Sanders announced his candidacy, predicted that “his weak track record with black voters-- a vital base in the Democratic Party-- could be a potential threat to his candidacy.” Echoing the conventional wisdom of the 2016 campaign, the piece made no mention of the CNN poll issued two months earlier that found Sanders had a higher approval rating with nonwhite voters than any other major candidate.

Ember’s March 29 article, “Bernie Sanders Says ‘No’ to Incrementalism, Highlighting Divide Among Democrats,” started with a neutral enough headline, but ended with a harsh critique by a fierce Sanders opponent, whose politics the reporter misrepresents:

“The path to the White House and to majorities has to be in a pragmatic, progressive area,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for Policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. “If you go too far left, Donald Trump gets re-elected and Republicans control both houses of Congress.”

“Our heads are in the clouds, but our feet are also on the ground at the same time,” he added. He cited his group’s universal healthcare plan, which he said was “just as ambitious” as Mr. Sanders’ proposed “Medicare for all.” There was, however, a key difference.

“It just doesn’t blow up the system,” Mr. Kessler said. “It builds on the existing system.”

But Third Way is a fiscally conservative, not a “center left,” think tank. Given the state of public opinion, a group that pushes to cut Social Security and Medicare, and calls raising taxes on billionaires “soaking the rich,” is to the right of centrist. In 2013, of 29 trustees on Third Way’s board, 20 were investment bankers, three were CEOs and two were corporate lawyers.

Third Way’s “about” section reads, “Our work is grounded in the mainstream American values of opportunity, freedom and security.” They continue, “But we identify as center-left, because we see that space in US politics as offering the only real path for advancing those ideals in the century ahead.” For Third Way, identifying as “center-left” is lip service, a strategic necessity in a nation that has moved to the left and whose demographics promise a more diverse and left electorate to come.

Ember chooses the label that Third Way uses for itself, because if she accurately identified its corporatist mission and positions, she could not use one of its leaders as an objective authority on the efficacy of Bernie Sanders’ proposal of free healthcare for all. It would be obvious that Third Way’s healthcare plan was in no way as ambitious as Sanders’, and that it was using the term “universal” to undermine single payer.

Reflecting its function as a corporate advocate for moving the Democratic Party to the right, Third Way has consistently disparaged Sanders and progressive politics in general. In a 2013 Wall Street Journal op-ed (12/2/13), Kessler (and Third Way co-founder and president Jon Cowan) declared that “economic populism is dead,” urging Democrats not to follow Elizabeth Warren and Bill deBlasio “over the populist cliff.” Kessler singled out Sanders in a USA Today op-ed (12/15/17), declaring, “Take It From Voters, Democrats Don’t Want a Bernie Sanders.”

In October 2018, Third Way’s executive vice president Matt Bennet (who can be seen in this video (below) refusing to disclose how much money his think tank gets from Wall Street) disqualified Sanders as a presidential candidate: “The exception is Sen. Sanders. We’re open to everybody except for him.” That would seem to make the organization an odd source to go to to evaluate Sanders’ policy proposals.



But Ember turned to Kessler again in her April 27 article, “Bernie Sanders Opens Space for Debate on Voting Rights for Incarcerated People,” to comment on Sanders’ call to enfranchise the incarcerated:

“There’s a difference between felons who are in prison for nonviolent offenses and those who are in for capital offenses,” said Jim Kessler, executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a center-left think tank. Mr. Sanders’ remarks, he added, “seemed like a bit of a stumble.”

The comment seemed like a bit of a stumble for Kessler, into an area where he has no evident expertise, and, interestingly, where Third Way hardly wades.

Ember’s May 17 article, “Mayor and ‘Foreign Minister’: How Bernie Sanders Brought the Cold War to Burlington,” presented as problematic and incriminating the senator’s support of Nicaraguan Sandinistas and his opposition to the CIA-backed Contra rebels trying to overthrow them-- whose systematic pattern of gross human rights violations in the 1980s included death squad assassination, kidnapping, rape, mutilation and torture. In a subsequent interview, Ember’s first and apparently most pressing question to Sanders was whether he had heard an anti-American chant at a rally he and approximately 499,999 other people attended. Her second question was whether he would have stayed at the event if he had heard it.

While NBC’s Meet the Press (5/19/19) and New York’s Jonathan Chait (5/27/19) accepted and amplified Ember’s framing, other journalists and historians familiar with Latin American history condemned the piece as context-lacking  “neo-McCarthyite,” “‘anti-American’ baiting,” “only slightly more subtle than Fox News.” Calling the piece “fundamentally ahistorical” “bothsidesism,” the Long Version’s Jonathan Katz (5/20/19) wrote that Ember doesn’t “have much experience covering foreign affairs in general or Latin America in particular. It shows.” Journalist Ryan Cooper (The Week, 5/29/19) quipped, “Americans should be very concerned about Bernie Sanders’ record of opposing mass murder.”

For this article on Sanders’ foreign policy past, Ember thought it would be appropriate to get a quote from a significant player in the Iran/Contra scandal:

Otto J. Reich, a former special envoy for Latin America who helped oversee Nicaragua policy for the Reagan administration, said that by the middle of the 1980s a politician like Mr. Sanders “should have known better” than to fawn over Mr. Ortega.

Reagan’s “Nicaragua policy” involved illegally funding the terrorist Contras in an effort to overthrow the elected Sandinista government. And he oversaw it as director of the now defunct State Department’s Office of Public Diplomacy, working with CIA propaganda experts and Army psy-ops specialists, leaking hoaxes, spreading rumors, smearing, and pressuring and threatening reporters,  in order to whitewash the Contras and demonize the Sandinistas.

Reich’s office was condemned by the U.S. Comptroller General, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional Iran/Contra Committee and a House Foreign Affairs committee for conducting “prohibited, covert propaganda activities,” including psychological operations (psy-ops) “beyond the range of acceptable agency public information activities.”



Ember, though, offers Reich as an expert witness on Sanders’ Cold War activities:

“He has, by virtue of these travels and associations, joined up with some of the most repressive regimes in the world,” Mr. Reich said of Mr. Sanders, alluding to his visit to Nicaragua and subsequent trips to the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Speaking of travels and associations, as well as Cuba, Ember fails to mention that Reich has worked as a lobbyist for Bacardi-Martini and Lockheed Martin, and tried to get an anti-Castro terrorist a US visa. As historian Greg Grandin told me in an interview (Katie Halper Show, 6/4/19):

The Office of Public Diplomacy was one of the most corrupting and degrading instruments of democracy you can imagine…. It was a destabilization  and disinformation campaign.

“People like Sydney Ember,” he noted, are “the product of that reeducation.”

Back to domestic issues, Ember ended her May 23 article, “Sanders’ Education Plan Renews Debate Over Charter Schools and Segregation,” on a predictably down note:

But while the charter-school issue might be relevant in cities, Mr. Loadholt said, it was hardly top-of-mind for voters in the state’s expansive rural areas, where charter schools are rare. “To a hammer, everything is a nail,” he said. “And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by millionaires and billionaires.”

Ember describes Jarrod Loadholt as “a Democratic strategist who has worked on education policy in South Carolina.” This obfuscating description was one of the many things that led Diane Ravitch to write her blog post, “The New York Times vs. Senator Bernie Sanders. ” I’ll let Ravitch explain:

The real stinker in the Times’ article comes at the end, where the writers quote someone unfamiliar to me. I know many education activists in South Carolina, but I have never run across Jarrod Loadholt…. I googled. He is a lawyer and lobbyist in Washington, DC, who was born in South Carolina. I can find no evidence of any involvement by him in any education issues. His specialty seems to be consumer finance. Why was he called upon to put down Senator Sanders’ factual statement that the Waltons, the DeVos family and hedge fund managers are behind the push for charter schools? Senator Sanders made his statement in South Carolina, and Loadholt was born there. South Carolina has dreadful education policy. When did Loadholt work on it and with what results? To the naked eye, he was called upon as a Beltway insider to cut Bernie Sanders down with a false statement. Shameful.

In fact, there are no traces of Loadholt having worked on any education policy. When I tweeted out Ravitch’s piece, he responded, “Lol. I guess if you’re a lawyer or a lobbyist, you could at no point in your life worked on ed policy in SC.” When I asked him if he had worked on education policy, he replied, “My quote speaks for itself. And it’s like a month old.” Loadholt has also tweeted that Sanders is “like a rash.”

Loadholt does have experience as a lobbyist and currently works at Pine Street Strategies, a lobbying firm whose clients include Anheuser-Busch and the National Bankers Association (NBA). It was in his capacity as an NBA lobbyist that Loadholt defended a sweeping rollback of Dodd/Frank banking regulations.  Dubbed the Bank Lobbyist Act by critics, which included the NAACP, the bill made it easier for banks to discriminate against communities of color. Loadholt, however, dismissed the concerns: “[Black] banks don’t have the luxury of waiting on a perfect bill…. If we thought the [bill] did substantial damage to African-Americans, we would not support it.”

Then there’s the June 12 article, originally headlined “Sanders Delivers Defense of His Democratic Socialist Philosophy” and later renamed “Bernie Sanders Calls His Brand of Socialism a Pathway to Beating Trump,” where Ember quoted as an authority Mary Anne Marsh, whom she described as “a Democratic strategist in Boston who worked for Senators Senators John Kerry and Edward M. Kennedy.” Marsh did not mince words in her assessment of Sanders’ politics, policies and electability:

Most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism and his economic policies. Ultimately, Bernie Sanders giving this speech will appeal to his base and no one else, and it gives fodder to Trump and the Republicans.

But the woman linking Sanders’ socialist rhetoric to a Trump victory is not just a Democratic strategist. When reporters at places like the Financial Times, CNBC, NPR, Yahoo! Business and Jewish News Services quote her, they cite her as a principal at the Dewey Square Group, a lobbying and public relations firm. Dewey Square’s corporate clients have included Allegiance Healthcare Corporation, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Coca-Cola, Collegiate Funding Services, Countrywide Mortgage, DuPont, General Motors Corporation, Grocery Manufacturers of America (GMA), Mortgage Insurance Companies of America, Purdue Pharma, Starbucks, United Health Group. The US Chamber of Commerce hired the firm to fight for caps on damages that can be paid in lawsuits; the National Restaurant Association paid them to fight against a law that made it easier for unions to organize workers; and Fix the Debt to push its austerity astroturf campaign to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

When Dewey Square was caught (CJR, 2/24/09) tricking senior citizens into signing letters to the editor on behalf of its client Medicare Advantage, Marsh tried to blame the hapless victims who had been lured to events with door prizes and free food and were unaware of what they were signing, positing, “The time that elapsed between the meetings when the seniors saw the letters and the letters’ arrival at the newspaper may have clouded some memories.”

Her career as a lobbyist for many of the industries that would be most impacted by Sanders’ proposals might explain Marsh’s obvious animus against the candidate, as displayed in the May 20 edition of her weekly Fox News column, “Bernie Sanders’ Incredible Shrinking Candidacy-- Why He Won’t Be Dem Nominee.” One of Sanders’ apparent insurmountable weaknesses, she wrote, is that people “remember Sanders didn’t support Clinton in the general election against Trump.” People with better memories recall that Sanders was one of the most energetic surrogates for Clinton on the campaign trail, campaigning constantly for her in battleground states (New Yorker, 11/4/16).

Marsh is right when she says that “most Democrats running don’t subscribe to Bernie Sanders’s democratic socialism,” which is why he’s seen as a unique threat to those who promote rapacious profiteering in the areas of finance, health care, education and the military. Third Way made that clear, once again, at a conference they held last week, where its co-founder Matt Bennett singled out Sanders’ vision from his opponents’: “One is a Democratic capitalist narrative…. The other is a socialist narrative,” notably omitting the “Democratic” descriptor for the latter.

By presenting her sources as objective authorities, instead of paid lobbyists and austerity ideologues, Ember both conceals and advances their agenda, undermining the integrity of the Fourth Estate, our democracy, and one of the most popular politicians.