By Nolan Higdon & Mickey Huff,

Truthout

It’s 2020, but it could well be 2016 all over again — history is repeating itself as the cadre of neoliberal Democratic Party leaders who worked to derail Sen. Bernie Sanders’s previous presidential bid four years ago are once again projecting their confirmation biased, pro-corporate agendas into the primaries. Along with an establishment media that frames the issue of “electability” in favor of party centrists and moderates, these interests work against more popularly polling progressive candidates, like Sanders, first by ignoring them, then by attack.

Back in 2016, Democratic National Committee’s efforts to suppress Sanders’s chances included giving Hillary Clinton advance notice of debate questions, engaging anti-Semitism by emphasizing Sanders’s Jewish heritage and counting delegates’ votes before they had voted, to cite a few examples.

Four years later, they are once again aligning with many corporate media outlets to try to portray Sanders as an unelectable outlier, despite clear and mounting polling evidence to the contrary.

As we noted in our book United States of Distraction, CNN, Washington Post and The New York Times tacitly admitted their reporting on the 2016 election was inadequate and flawed, and didn’t go far enough to inform voters. However, despite their mea culpae, these same establishment media outlets continue to censor progressive positions and distort the facts for audiences. The people, policies, debates, pundits and media coverage have remained mostly static. One of the tactics up until now has been to try to ignore progressives, and Sanders in particular. But, before voters take to the polls, we want former Clinton supporters to recognize that, just like many Trump voters, they are being led to vote against their own interests, and the broader interests of the public, by the corporate news media and party establishment leaders who have done their best to create a Bernie blackout.

The Bernie Blackout

“The Bernie blackout is real; it is not just a figment of our imagination. It almost seems like every morning these networks get a script that says ‘blackout Bernie Sanders,’” said the national campaign co-chair of Sanders’s presidential campaign, Nina Turner, on a December 5, 2019, episode of “The Rising.” Indeed, GDELT, a real-time open data global graph tracker, found that Sanders was covered three to four times less than Joe Biden in 2019 despite being neck and neck in the polls. Similarly, a November 2019 In These Times poll found that MSNBC gave Sanders the least frequent coverage and the most negative of overall coverage. This is especially shocking given that Sanders has been polling in first or second place.

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