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The Fix is In: Media Edition
This morning the Daily Beast broke a new “bombshell” about Bernie Sanders, basically accusing him of racism:
EXCLUSIVE: As Sanders floats at the top of the polls, previously unreported statements from the '70s where he compared predominantly white workers in his home state of Vermont to black slaves may put his past and judgment into questionhttps://t.co/s8V6GKl5yE
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) January 23, 2020
In one archival interview obtained by The Daily Beast, Sanders told a local newspaper that the sale of a privately held mining company harkened to “the days of slavery when black people were sold to different owners without their consent” https://t.co/Qsa85TBIaf
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) January 23, 2020
He also and compared the service economy to chattel slavery.
Despite a long history of advocating for civil rights, Sanders faced difficulty winning over voters of color in 2016, particularly across the Deep South. https://t.co/Qsa85TBIaf— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) January 23, 2020
I only have one concern about Sanders here: Who released their oppo research, Biden or Warren? The Daily Beast framing on Twitter is instructive, and quite honestly, terrifying. The author of the social media posts opens with “as he floats at the top of the polls…” we understand why these decades-old statements are seeing the light of day: he’s becoming too dangerous. The accusations are pathetically weak, but the Beast wants to plant the seed of doubt for black voters in, especially in the South, because they constitute an important voting bloc that has been swaying in Sanders’ direction.
This is more media collusion with other Democratic campaigns in open warfare against Sanders. Recently the Warren campaign leaked a supposed scoop to CNN about Sanders telling her that a woman could never be President. There were two people in the room, Warren and Sanders; a classic he-said, she-said. And yet, the media decided to run with the narrative that Sanders did indeed make such statements, and neglected to point out the glaringly obvious: the leak about Sanders came from within the Warren campaign. On MSNBC, Noah Rothman had a succinct takedown of the situation:
Hoping someone would post this. I have thoughts on Warren’s tactics here. They’re not kind. https://t.co/iAYNe9zchJ
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) January 17, 2020
It keeps making me wonder: Is the experience of watching the media work towards Bernie Sanders’ destruction going to end up red pilling his supporters?
I used to read The Economist religiously. I loved the tone it took regarding world affairs I was totally unfamiliar with. I didn’t know anything about domestic politics in India or Indonesia, but I felt like I did after I read the paper. That is, until I started to follow Israel news closely, and read coverage of it in the Economist. It wasn’t just wrong, it was maliciously so. And it made me wonder: What else are they lying through their teeth about and I just have no idea? We ended up letting our subscription lapse, I just couldn’t trust the paper anymore.
Will Sanders supporters have a similar experience with the mainstream media? This week it was reported that 9 in 10 Republicans have lost faith in the media, and some wrongly attributed this phenomenon to President Trump:
With 9 in 10 Republicans reporting having lost faith in the media (because Trump's rhetoric has worked), I argue it's time for newspapers to rethink their relationships with readers and end endorsements now – my op-ed is up on @NBCNewsTHINK – https://t.co/q08k3vpb9p
— Matt Laslo (@MattLaslo) January 20, 2020
This is bigger than Trump. I always say that the President keeps going back to the anti-media well because it keeps filling back up with water. With Sanders’ popularity soaring and mainstream Democrats colluding with the mainstream media to kneecap him, I can’t help but wonder if we’ll see similar numbers on the Left in short order.
Published in General
It is not even news that once upon a time an old communist spoke of slavery in economic rather than racial terms. It’s not a leak but planted spin.
Tough to see Bernie as a victim: An established left wing party that suppresses dissenting voices and works to make voting nothing more than a chance to endorse the choices of the party leaders is exactly the system Sanders is trying to bring about.
Breaking news: The last 2 FISA warrant renewals taken out on Carter Page were unlawful.
The entire declassified FISC report is here.
The initial warrant and the first renewal are still under investigation. Should the initial application be found to have been without probable cause, we no doubt will begin to see Democrats, Never Trumpers and “journalists” claiming that the Page warrant applications were the result of a Russian plot to discredit the FBI and the DOJ in 3…2….1…
I think this is a really interesting insight. I’ve heard another friend make a similar comment about the BBC—another (American) friend had said, I love the BBC, they’re so knowledgeable about Indian politics; it’s just too bad they don’t have a better grasp of American politics. Same for things other than other countries’ politics, maybe—the news media can always seem knowledgeable about the things you don’t already know about. But when they cover something you do have some knowledge of, you realize that they’re not necessarily experts at economics or politics or the health-care industry or whatever it is that they’re covering in that piece; they’re only experts at reporting the news.
(If that…)
A fine example of someone who successfully fought off Gell-Mann Amnesia.
Good example/explanation of Gell-Mann Amnesia
Or you begin to realize that they aren’t just getting the story wrong, they’re getting it wrong, with remarkable consistency, in one and only one direction; only certain kinds of facts mysteriously overlooked or omitted; only certain sorts of opinions sought and quoted even as the lacunae form a shape too obvious to ignore.
And, as Ms. Mandel puts it, you ask yourself: “what else are they lying to me about?”
Not unless they change their overall world view. If they stay on the left and are apoplectic about the media bias against Sanders, it won’t be because of the bias, but because they bias isn’t working for their guy. That’s the situation Hillary Clinton ended up in back during the 2008 campaign, when she got the Bernie treatment from much of the media that had cast their lot with Obama:
Hillary was troubled because outlets like MSNBC were treating her like a Republican. She wasn’t outraged that MSNBC and those other outlets treated Republicans the way they were treating her.
I think the Media has their favorites, so it isn’t necessarily a leak by another candidate. Additionally, there are lots of establishment Democrats that will not let an outsider win their party. Look for all the old familiar names to start endorsing other candidates. Rumor has it that Obama may announce anyone-but-Bernie. I have seen this rumor planted in the news today and weeks ago.
Here’s how I see it playing out. Bernie, Biden, Warren and Bloomberg split the delegate count and it goes to the convention. The DNC insiders reject Bernie (Independent) and Bloomberg (former Republican). The party chooses Warren, because clearly Joe has mental decline and Pete has #NeverPete. AmyK and others have zero delegates and are not considered. The revenge for Bernie, who had the most delegates going in, is that his voters will *hate* the DNC. Most will stay home, but many will vote for Trump. The next Bernie bro to shoot up politicians at a ball field might be looking for Democrats. Trump gets 350+ electoral votes.
More popcorn!!
Not a term I was familiar with—thank you for introducing me to it, this is interesting stuff.
https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect
The difference between this story, which has been floating out there for a while, and the Warren-Sanders discussion is that while the latter may or may not have happened the way Warren says it did (I bet it didn’t) while Sanders actually made that statement in the 70s. The funny thing is its the same rationale defenders of Southern slavery used when accusing Northerners of being no better because of “wage slavery”. Both were anti-capitalist.
Certainly I agree that the news media also have a huge leftward-bias problem. I guess I think they have at least two big problems.
You rang?
Bethany, I don’t think you understand who Bernie Sanders is. He is not a real candidate. He is running right now the same way he ran in 2016. As a tool. As a way to divide up the Dem party so that people get involved, and they spend their time campaigning for Bernie. When he lets the Dem Leadership push him out once again at the 2020 Democratic Convention, he will fold just like he did in 2016.
So he is well aware that the news media is a game, a sort of informational three card monte. He is probably well paid to do what he does.
When he ran for the Party’s Presidential nomination, he raised more money than Hillary in the period of Jan 2016 to the time of early July 2016, when the Convention took place. For example:
Sanders raised $20,000,000 in the month of January 2016, $5,000,000 more than Clinton during the same time period, with an average donation of $27.
####
Unlike Hillary, who keeps her own campaign monies, Bernie let the Dem leadership shuffle his raised funds from his supporters off to HRC. One reason Hillary is a perpetual candidate is because as long as a candidate continues to express interest in running for office, they do not have to disband their funds, as Fed campaign laws demand. Hillary loves money, and she will continue to express interest in running.
Bernie also knows that the DNC flipped the votes for him over to Hillary. He doesn’t seem to care, which supports the idea that he is a willing tool.
Those pictures! That filter! ORANGE MAN BAD
Some news stories report that former POTUS Obama is unhappy with the Bernie-surge, and might say some chastening words about backing a barking-mad Red. To Bernie’s advocates, this conforms that Obama is a lame centrist who exemplifies the worst of the mealy-minded DNC. The Lightwalker is now a 20-watt bulb.
To be fair, some of today’s Bernie Bros already thought he was a wimp 11 years ago at this time, because he had been in office for four days and hadn’t yet ordered Chimpy McBusHitlerburton and his puppet master Cheney arrested for war crimes, and hadn’t used the power of the FCC to shut down Fox News. As the Project Veritas hidden camera videos the past two weeks have shown, they’re pretty confident Bernie won’t make the same mistake this time….
All the News That’s Fit to Pimp
Politics is dirty, isn’t it?
Fortunately I don’t remember hardly any of the idiotic things that I said 45 years ago.
It’s really obvious. The Democrats don’t believe in elections. Where is this country going where one major party rigs the election against their natural standard bearer and tries to impeach the guy on the other party?
Bernie crossed Hillary.
He’s lucky he hasn’t been suicided yet.
Laslo might be right that 9 in 10 Republicans have lost faith in the media. But it wasn’t thanks to Trump’s rhetoric. I lost faith in the media 25 years ago.
Well he did have a heart attack. Who knows how that was induced? Hmmmmmm……..
I lost faith in network news during the Reagan era – stopped watching it altogether. After we got our satellite dish, we stopped watching network TV.
I suspect it will be Biden, because Warren projects too much of a leftist-extreme image to the average voter. However, Good Ole Joe has said he’d pick a woman Veep. It could be Warren, but more likely Klobuchar, possibly even Gabbard (Wear that uniform!).
Post-Watergate, the media was wildly overconfident in their ability to control the narrative and to move the American public’s political choices around to where they wanted it to go. The fact that Reagan was elected over Carter and then won in a landslide over Mondale was the first time that they really started getting irked out in the open that the stupid voters weren’t listening to them, and the rise of first AM talk radio, followed by Fox News and then new media Internet sites really sent a lot of them over the edge. At the same time the new generation of 20-something reporters don’t even try to hide their biases, and in fact in many cases are rewarded for them, because the media outlets they work for have decided to cater to a niche segment of angry progressives, in the hope that brand loyalty will lock in viewers or readers in today’s fractured media market (it’s why Ben Rhodes was only partially right when he said “They know nothing.” The people who are signing their paychecks don’t want them to be questioning or contentious when they’re getting information from someone like Ben Rhodes).
The twitter comments on Tonya Sighn’s post are great. The Bernie people point out how Noah is great, Morning Joe was solid and even Tucker Carlson fully came to Bernie’s defense. They seemed shocked that Republicans would be willing to stick up for Bernie.
It wasn’t just wrong, it was maliciously so. And it made me wonder: What else are they lying through their teeth about and I just have no idea? We ended up letting our subscription lapse, I just couldn’t trust the paper anymore.
Good to see many who recognize the Murray Gell-Mann amnesia syndrome. I used to read The Economist and for much the same reasons. The Internet has provided more sources of information,. For example, I read UK newspapers for news about the US. Fox News and AM talk radio were huge advances in learning about the world. Fox is now run by the Murdoch boys who seem to be shifting left. There is an old Chinese proverb that applies here, I believe.
First generation – coolie, Second generation – Merchant, Third generation – Rich Man, Fourth generation, – Coolie.
I remember a few of mine. I just hope no one else does.
Also, I saw on yesterday’s Daily Wire that Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign in South Carolina had contacted law enforcement concerning Project Veritas’ interview with the Bernie staffer who advocated concentration camps for conservatives. Why am I not surprised?
Are they seeking to have someone from Veritas placed in a camp?
I believe the Veritas folks are supposed to go straight to the guillotine. The rest of us are slotted for the concentration whoops re-education camps. Final plans are being worked out by Philosophy majors at UC-Berkeley.