Published on Tuesday, March
08, 2016 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
by Adam
Johnson
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/08/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-bernie-sanders-16-hours
In what has to be some kind of
record, the Washington Post ran 16 negative stories on Bernie Sanders in 16
hours, between roughly 10:20 PM EST Sunday, March 6, to 3:54 PM EST Monday,
March 7—a window that includes the crucial Democratic debate in Flint,
Michigan, and the next morning’s spin:
March 6, 10:20 PM: Bernie
Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release
Lots of Criminals
March 7, 12:39 AM: Clinton
Is Running for President. Sanders Is Doing Something Else
March 7, 4:04 AM: This
Is Huge: Trump, Sanders Both Using Same Catchphrase
March 7, 9:24 AM: Bernie
Sanders’s Two Big Lies About the Global Economy
March 7, 8:25 AM: Five
Reasons Bernie Sanders Lost Last Night’s Democratic Debate
March 7, 8:44 AM: Bernie
Sanders Says White People Don’t Know What It’s Like to Live in a ‘Ghetto.’
About That…
March 7, 11:49 AM: The
NRA Just Praised Bernie Sanders — and Did Him No Favors in Doing So
March 7, 12:55 PM: Even
Bernie Sanders Can Beat Donald Trump
March 7, 1:08 PM: What
Bernie Sanders Still Doesn’t Get About Arguing With Hillary Clinton
March 7, 2:16 PM: Here’s
Something Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders Have in Common: And the Piece of the
Argument That Bernie Doesn’t Get Quite Right.
March 7, 3:31 PM: ‘Excuse
Me!’: Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Know How to Talk About Black People
March 7, 3:54 PM: And
the Most Partisan Senator of 2015 Is … Bernie Sanders!
All of these posts paint his
candidacy in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he’s a
clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to
women. Even the one article about Sanders beating Trump implies this is somehow
a surprise—despite the fact that Sanders consistently out-polls
Hillary Clinton against the New York businessman.
There were two posts in this
time frame that one could consider neutral: “These
Academics Say Bernie Sanders’ College Plan Will Be a Boon for African-American
Students, Will It?” and “Democratic
Debate: Clinton, Sanders Spar Over Fracking, Gun Control, Trade and Jobs.”
None could be read as positive.
While the headlines don’t
necessarily reflect all the nuances of the text, as I’ve noted before, only
40 percent of the public reads past the headlines, so how a story is
labeled is just as important, if not more so, than the substance of the story
itself.
The Washington Post was sold
in 2013 to libertarian Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who is worth approximately $49.8
billion.
Despite being ideologically
opposed to the Democratic Party (at least in principle), Bezos has enjoyed
friendly ties with both the Obama administration and the CIA. As Michael
Oman-Reagan notes, Amazon was awarded
a $16.5 million contract with the State Department the last year Clinton
ran it. Amazon also has over
$600 million in contracts with the Central Intelligence Agency, an
organization Sanders said he wanted to abolish in 1974, and still says he “had
a lot of problems with.” FAIR has previously
criticized the Washington Post for failing to disclose, when reporting on
tech giant Uber, that Bezos also owns more than $1 billion in Uber stock.
The Washington Post’s
editorial stance has been staunchly
anti-Sanders,
though the paper contends that its editorial board is entirely independent of
both Bezos and the paper’s news reporting.
© 2016 Fairness and Accuracy
In Reporting (FAIR)
Adam Johnson is an associate
editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. Follow him on
Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.
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