Joe Biden’s decision to not run for president and Jeb Bush’s lagging campaign have received far more coverage than Bernie Sanders
Story Transcript
REPORTER: Donald Trump getting saturation coverage from the media. JAISAL NOOR, TRNN: Even Fox News is talking about the lack of media coverage of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. REPORTER: At the same time Bernie Sanders, who got higher poll numbers than Trump in a recent poll is largely being ignored. So is Sanders being treated like a member of the witness protection program? NOOR: In the same 5-minute segment, Fox talked about Sanders for less than 90 seconds before turning to Donald Trump. And a recent report found that flagship nightly news programs did 234 minutes of stories on Donald Trump in 2015 versus just 10 minutes for Bernie Sanders. Trump has also received more network coverage than all the Democratic candidates combined. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters has been tracking how the media has covered this election campaign. ERIC BOEHLERT: It’s sort of a perfect encapsulation, right? Trump gets this massive over-amount of media coverage. They literally can’t stop writing about him, writing about his, you know, extreme rhetoric. NOOR: Mainstream pundits have fired back against the claim Sanders has been ignored. LYNN SWEET: Bernie Sanders is not getting ignored. He’s getting plenty of attention in the key states of Iowa and New Hampshire, if you look at media there. If you look at the coverage of frontrunner to frontrunner, you will find that Bernie Sanders, even though he lags far behind at this point of Hillary Clinton, is being treated as a very solid number two. NOOR: Even Jeb Bush, who’s polling fifth amongst Republicans, is getting more than five times the coverage of Sanders. BOEHLERT: Joe Biden, who’s not even running, if you look again at the evening network news, ABC, CBS, NBC, they gave significantly more time to cover the story of will Joe Biden run for president than they did for Bernie Sanders, who’s actually running a campaign, and was running a campaign most of this year. NOOR: Sanders’ campaign national press secretary Symone Sanders notes that he’s had many newsworthy accomplishments. SYMONE SANDERS: Senator Sanders is the only candidate in this race across both Democrats and Republicans that has garnered the huge crowds that we’ve seen, you know, 10,000, 15,000, 28,000 people. Senator Sanders is the only candidate in this race, in the history actually of candidates to make a bid for the White House, who has garnered over 2.3 million contributions. That’s history, and that’s not being covered. When these matchups of Republican candidates versus Democratic candidates in general elections are conducted, Senator Sanders does better than Secretary Clinton in a lot of these matchups. He beats Republicans, including Donald Trump. STEPHEN ZUNES: Part of it, I think, is that he has been a responsible and polite campaigner. He’s not engaged in attacks. And of course the media really likes to follow these kinds of fights, and Republicans have been giving a lot of entertainment value this campaign season. I think also there is sort of this consensus among the establishment that Hillary Clinton is the inevitable nominee, compared to the Republican race, which is pretty wide open. But I do think, you know, frankly, there is on some level concern among, within the corporate media, about having someone who has an explicitly socialist, albeit social democratic kind of socialism, vision for America, who is challenging some of the basic economic institutions and assumptions of policy that affects powerful interests, including those who own the media.
End
DISCLAIMER: Please note that transcripts for The Real News Network are typed from a recording of the program. TRNN cannot guarantee their complete accuracy.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
