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Bernie Blindness?
The media bias against Bernie Sanders's campaign has been covered extensively online, and for the most part, only online. What's responsible for his lack of cable news coverage are the underlying interests of the cable news networks, many who are privately owned and operated by billionaires.These are the same networks where state department officials and other powerfully positioned individuals have come to be interviewed and used as sources uncritically more often than not.. Bernie’s appeal cannot be covered by the mainstream media,as it goes against their underlying private interests to do so. Correctly, these main stream media channels try to tank his campaign by not covering him. Their political instincts push many looking for a fairer coverage of the Senator towards alternative online media (Truthdig.com,The Hill). The bias towards all candidates is only natural as all media outlets will always deliver the news with some level of bias, but with Bernie we are seeing a level of biased treatment beyond what needs to be deemed acceptable. The battle wages on where-ever news is published, including even a Wikipedia article battle being fought over whether the title should be "Media bias against Bernie Sanders" or "Media coverage of Bernie Sanders.” Such exclusion by the mainstream media is nothing new. As the old adage goes, first they ignore you...
The leading submission as of today on the "bernie blindness" subreddit is the latest of countless examples of the difficulties Bernie Sanders faces. The ideology behind the campaign may be to blame as to why Bernie's candidacy is not favored, to put it lightly, by the establishment. Assuming there is an established pattern here, I think investigating the reasons for the bias against Bernie is useful to those interested in discerning realities, and to those of us firmly committed to the Bernie side of the equation to better push back against the narrative.
"Cue Bono?" Who benefits?
An article released today on Jacobin reads on how headlines are often skewed to bias our perception.
"Over time, people stopped being able to recall these specific incidents, if they ever caught wind of them at all. “Bernie’s sexist” was just a feeling many people had, and they didn’t know where it came from. This is how baseless rumors harden into consensus. It’s how we ended up with MSNBC analysts saying that “Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl. I can’t even identify for you what exactly it is. But I see him as sort of a not pro-woman candidate.”
The only way to deal with such distortions is to push back with the truth."
The only way to deal with such distortions is to push back with the truth."
Reuters is owned by the Thomson Reuters parent company. Founded as a newspaper press in Ontario, this company would merge decades later with a transmitting stock market quotations business, founded by Paul Julius Reuter. The stock market is a measure of the expected surplus value which can be extracted by a company. Selling stock information to investors while being in the business of selling the truth is enough to make one reconsider the value of privately owned corporate media when you take into account conflict of interest.
As Sam Biddle from The Intercept points out, Reuter's parent company profits from ICE detainment camps. To refashion a famous quote "there is no profit motive that is completely ethical." Taking into account all the good the fourth estate does in reporting the news and squaring it up against the ICE detainment camp profiting, a case could be made that Thomas Reuter's media arm, Reuters media, may still comes out as a net positive to society when tallying up the moral balance sheet.
However, another blow to Reuter’s moral balance sheet measuring how much value they add to society as a functionary of the fourth estate, is the hiring of Deputy editor-in-chief Paul Ingrassia. Ingrassia was accused as a climate change skeptic burying stories about the topic by a former Reuter's reporter. The Daily Climate', listed as an independent, foundation-funded news service, came to its defense by lauding Reuters for having more publications on the dangers of climate change then the Associated Press, The Guardian and The New York Times.. Despite the Daily Climate's defense of Reuters, mediamatters.org found a 48% decline in climate coverage after the Wall Street Journal editor took over. Their current editor, Stephen J. Adler, is also an alumni of The Wall Street Journal.
The British Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), funded Reuters under the admission of gaining "political influence over Reuters' work" in the late 1960s. The media is often accused of working in lockstep with the whims of the government. Similarly in a three-week study done in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq, fair.org found only 3 percent of U.S. sources represented or expressed opposition to the war.
Who watches the watchmen?
Mediabiasfactcheck.com neglected the aforementioned kowtowing to 'pressure' or funding, in its profiling of Reuter’s bias.
"During both World Wars, Reuters came under pressure from the British government to serve British interests. In 1941 Reuters avoided this pressure by restructuring itself as a private company."
Likewise,the climate change controversy with Ingrassia, formerly Reuters' managing deputy-editor, from 2011 to 2016, who previously worked for 31 years at the The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones , isn’t mentioned on the media watchdog site.
"The only way to deal with such distortions is to push back with the truth".
The case is self-evident that a newspaper has a financial interest in telling the truth to sell more papers. However, there could be a more profitable financial motive in obfuscating that same truth. Taking this to its ultimate conclusion, “telling the truth”, means erring on the side of publishing whats profitable. All too often,truthiness takes a back seat to assuage the interests of the investors and owners of the for-profit media corporation. The media is not beholden to some first principle of truth telling first, biases second. In order for a democracy to stay true to itself, voters need access to reliable information. The media sphere must embed itself with a democratic organizational & operational structure for democracy to thrive.
Thank you for reading.I'd be happy if you stuck around and followed for future updates as I pursuit my career into journalism by sharing my work on here. Likewise if you value what I have to say and think its important for this type of message to get out of there then share my blog as well. I'm open to criticism and opinion from anything ranging from style to substance.
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