The paper had just run 16
negative stories about Sanders in 16 hours.
BY Adam Johnson
On Tuesday, FAIR published a straightforward
recapping of 16 hours of Washington Post stories that
displayed a remarkable run of negative articles about Democratic presidential
candidate Bernie Sanders. The FAIR post and a corresponding tweet went viral:
retweeted thousands of times, shared on Facebookand Reddit thousands
more, and written up in TruthDig,The Young Turks, USUncut and
the Daily
Caller.
Due to this surge of coverage
of our coverage of its coverage (yes, media criticism gets somewhat meta),
the Washington
Post decided to respond to our criticism, staffing out the unenviable
task to The Fix’s Callum Borchers, who gave us “Has
the Washington Post Been Too Hard on Bernie Sanders This Week?”
Right off, the framing is
inaccurate: The scope wasn’t “this week,” it was a 16-hour period after the
Flint, Michigan, debate—and following a weekend in which Sanders won three of
four state contests with Hillary Clinton. The do-or-die stakes for Sanders in
Michigan couldn’t have been higher, and how one of the most influential
newspapers in the United States covered his debate performance and his primary
showing was important.
After arguing that working for
the Washington Post would not impede his ability to show why the
paper was in the right, Borchers begins by casting aspersions on Sanders
conspiratorial partisans:
The notion of an anti-Sanders
agenda clearly resonated—no surprise, given that the Vermont senator has
complained about media coverage, generally, and the Post, specifically.
It doesn’t “resonate,” is the
implication, because it’s actually true; it must be that Dear Leader has
poisoned minds with thoughts of media conspiracy.
Borchers’ main effort is to
narrow the definition of a “negative” story.
First, the definition of
“negative” — in this case and in a lot of media griping — is overly broad. For
example, the “negative” category, according to FAIR, included a story
by The Fix's Philip Bump with the following headline:
“Bernie Sanders Pledges the US
Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals.”
Bump pointed out that to keep
a campaign promise — “At the end of my first term, we will not have more people
in jail than any other country” — Sanders would need to set free roughly a
quarter of the United States prison population, or about 567,000 criminals.
Is that negative? I mean, it’s
math.
At a moment when even the Koch
brothers are coming out against overincarceration, a story that thumbnails it
as “releasing lots of criminals” can indeed be considered a negative framing,
if not more importantly one that shortchanges readers’ intelligence and
understanding.
Still, note that “negative” is
not intended as the opposite of “factual.” When the George Bush Sr. campaign
focused on Michael Dukakis’ prison furlough program—the so-called “Willie
Horton” issue—its attacks were nominally fact-based. Yet many people saw them
as an unfair exploitation of racial fears, and it was relevant to address them
on those terms.
Bigger picture: The reason the
graphic and FAIR’s blog post went so viral is because people can intuitively
look at a litany of stories over such a short period and see bias. Nature made
us pattern-seeking mammals for a reason, and the Washington Post’s
post-debate coverage displays an obvious pattern.
And Borchers doesn’t so much
deny that pattern as attempt to justify it:
It is important, of course,
that a newspaper’s opinion and analysis pieces reflect a range of perspectives.
Overall, I can confidently say the Post‘s do. But if you’re going to take
a one-day sample — on a day when Sanders was coming off a debate
performance that was widely panned — you’re going to find a lot of
opinion and analysis that reflects that consensus.
His evidence, though, is
unpersuasive; for evidence that Sanders’ debating was “widely panned,” he links
only to a piece by Salon’s Amanda Marcotte—author of such articles as “Why
I’m Supporting Clinton Over Sanders” and “Let’s
Storm the Sanders’ He-Man Women-Haters Club.”
It’s true that many corporate
media pundits thought Sanders did poorly in the Flint debate, and that opinion
was the content of many of the negative stories that FAIR highlighted. But that
only spurs questions about the editorial choice to focus overwhelmingly on
debate etiquette in a time period in which Sanders’ actual electoral
performance included a victory in the Maine caucuses (announced during the Flint
debate) and top pollings in two out of three states. The former reflects
pundits’ opinions, while the latter reflects actual voters’ choices.
For a piece ostensibly
intended to prove the Post unbiased, Borchers’ conclusion is
problematic, in that it suggests that they are biased, but consider it
compensatory:
Finally, even if we accept the
idea that Post reporting, analysis and commentary combined to put
Sanders through the wringer, I fail to see the inherent trouble. As I’ve
written before, Sanders skated through the early portion of the primary
season on stories about his “yuge” crowds and better-than-expected poll
numbers. It was one of the perks of being an underdog.
Readers and voters don’t ask
for media to use their coverage to offer “perks” or comeuppances to candidates
as they see fit, but to render accurate coverage that reflects what voters are
concerned about.
In this case, a dry-eyed
reading suggests that the range of perspectives reflected by the Post's
pundit roster simply does not include many people who identify with the
challenge to the political establishment Sanders’ candidacy reflects—and
considerably more people who feel an affinity with the network of political,
economic and media elites who have thrown their support behind Clinton. That
this should be reflected in their editorial decision-making is not particularly
surprising, just worthy of consideration.
Adam Johnson is an associate
editor at AlterNet. Follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.
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