An example of Media bias against Bernie
(Above: Some of the stories run by the New York Daily News after
their editorial board interview with Senator Sanders)
After his win in the Wyoming caucus earlier this month, Sanders extended his winning streak to cover 8 of the last 9 contests, closing the delegate gap between Sanders and Clinton to roughly 200 delegates (counting only pledged delegates, not "superdelegates", see here for an explanation of superdelegates and why they shouldn't be included in the count thus far). The stakes are now raised considerably, with the New York primary tomorrow, with a whopping 247 pledged delegates up for grabs it is undoubtedly a critical state for either candidates to lock down.
We now turn to earlier in the month, on the 1st April Bernie Sanders met with the editorial board of the NY based print publication, the New York Daily News. Unfortunately for Sanders, the editorial board had laid out an ambush for the Senator, with their first question asking him directly if companies, specifically Apple, are "destroying the fabric of America" and had laid out the context for the question in a way that would frame Sanders response in a negative light, by highlighting that Apple was a company that "grew from nothing to 115,000 permanent employees" and in its 40th year anniversary as a company. Sanders repeatedly tried to include nuance and context in his answers, but was pressed a further 2 times to answer if they were "destroying the fabric of America". The height of the interview focused on Sanders proposal to break up the large Wall Street banks responsible for the financial crisis of 2008, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America etc. The editorial board pressed Sanders on how exactly he would go about breaking up the large banks, first with questioning who exactly would have the authority to break them up (asking if the Fed or the Secretary of Treasury would be able to), and then strangely focusing on which specific statutes would be used in legal proceedings, i.e statutes from existing legislation, which is something that no candidate would be able to tell the media, without having spent considerable time consulting experts, because you know, the Constitution, and as Sanders said "The President is not a Dictator". Sanders responded by pointing out that he also has the option of going after Wall Street banks on fraud charges, as they were selling Subprime mortgages that had false ratings, see this exchange between Sanders and the editorial board.
The rest of the interview followed a similar trend, with the board trying to guide Sanders towards the rocks on several issues, from Israel to Gun Control, later running stories on those topics with incredible headlines such as "Bernie's Sandy Hook Shame". The real headline of this story is the possible motivation for the NY Daily News obvious bias against Bernie, which leads us to the Billionaire owner of the Daily News, Mort Zuckerman. On the matter of Israel Zuckerman happens to be of the right-wing state of thinking that holds that Israel is never at fault, even when Israeli settlers are illegally moving into Palestinian lands. What is interesting are his ties to Hillary Clinton, with him contributing to the Clinton Foundation, its also probably coincidental that the Daily News endorsed Hillary Clinton sometime after the interview with Sanders. With this kind of blatant bias from the Daily News and other "establishment" publications such as The Washington Post, The Hill, The New York Times, aswell as practically all cable networks (save Fox), its no wonder why Americans, especially young Americans, are leaving traditional media for new, independent and online media,
You can read the entire transcript of the Interview here.
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