JULY 26, 2019
When MSNBC legal
analyst Mimi Rocah (7/21/19)
said that Bernie Sanders “made [her] skin crawl,” though she “can’t even
identify for you what exactly it is,” she was just expressing more overtly
the anti-Sanders
bias that pervades the network.
MSNBC‘s Mimi Rocah (7/21/19) explaining how
Bernie Sanders makes her “skin crawl.”
The hostility is so
entrenched, in fact, it seems to have corrupted MSNBC’s mathematical
reasoning and created a new system of arithmetic. The cable news network has
repeatedly made on-air and online mistakes about Sanders’ polling and other
numbers—always to his detriment, and never with any official correction.
Here are some new rules MSNBC seems
to follow when it comes to math and Bernie Sanders.
1. 49 <
48
Result: Sanders goes from
second to “fourth” place.
MSNBC made
a handy graphic for a poll on July 7 that showed 2020 match-ups against Trump
among Democratic voters. The list was in descending order of candidates’
polling numbers—except for Bernie Sanders, whose name is placed under Warren’s
and Harris’s, though he polls higher than both of them. (If the list is ordered
by the margin between the candidate and Trump, Sanders would be in third place,
behind Harris.)
MSNBC (7/7/19)
2. 5 >7
Result: Sanders goes from
second to “third” place.
Lest you think this was an
isolated incident, MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki placed Sanders’ name below
Warren’s on July 15, when he was “reporting” on a poll put out by the Washington
Postand NBC (MSNBC’s parent company.) Once again, the order of the
names is descending by poll numbers—except for Bernie Sanders’, which is, once
again, placed below where it should be. This time, Sanders is placed below
Warren, though he polls higher than she does (both in the percentage who say
they would vote for each candidate and the spread over Trump). This same order
is used in the online story’s headline (7/14/19),
which says, “Trump Trails Biden, Warren and Sanders in New NBC News/Wall
Street Journal Poll.”
MSNBC (7/15/19)
But it gets worse. It was
misleading to have Sanders’ name after Warren’s in the graphic, but an absolute
error or lie to say Warren was second, which Kornacki, who was talking about a
poll conducted by his own company, did. I had to re-watch the video to
make sure I wasn’t missing something, but Kornacki does indeed say (at 1:09):
“Elizabeth Warren, she’s been running second place, she is running second place
on the Democratic side. She leads Trump by 5 points.” Then Kornacki shows the
person who is actually in second place and says, “Bernie Sanders, he leads by 7
points.”
3. +5 = -5.
Result: Sanders “loses” ten
points.
Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd (5/24/19)
showed a graphic claiming that Sanders had gone down 5 points in a Quinnipiac
poll. Todd got the absolute value right, he just got the value sign wrong:
Sanders didn’t go down by 5 in the poll, he went up by 5 — a 10-point
difference.
MSNBC (5/24/19)
Quinnipiac (4/30/19)
Quinnipiac (5/21/19)
4. 25 = 28
Result: Sanders goes from
first to “second” place.
After an April Monmouth poll
showed Sanders polling at 27 percent among non-white voters and Biden polling
at 25 percent, Velshe and Ruhle (4/29/19) showed
a graphic which somehow added three points to Biden’s numbers, putting him in
“first” place.
MSNBC (4/29/19)
[IMAGE 7]
Monmouth (4/23/19)
5. Less than $200 = 0
Result: Sanders goes from a
candidate with one of the best records with female donors to one of the
“worst.”
Rachel Maddow on April 29 did
a segment (and tweeted)
about a study on the gender of campaign donors. Unfortunately,
she forgot to say the study she cited only looked at donors who gave $200 or
more. After praising Gillibrand for “doing the best in terms of targeting
female donors,” Maddow urged her viewers to
look at the other end of the
spectrum! Just strikes me as unsustainable. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg….
Look at them! Both of them are raising twice as much money from male donors as
they are from female donors. 66 and 67 percent of your donations are from
dudes? Dude!
MSNBC (4/29/19)
The same Open Secrets report Maddow
was citing explained that its results were skewed: Since
Sanders has the highest
amount of money coming from small donors…at 74 percent…[and] generally only
donations above $200 are itemized…the gender landscape of small donations are
absent.
In fact, according to Sanders’ communications
director, 46 percent of the 525,000 people who contributed to Sanders’
campaign during the first quarter were women. “It is virtually certain,” she
tweeted, “that more women have donated to our campaign than any other.”
Rachel Maddow: You’re a Rhodes
scholar, have a nightly news show, earn $7 million a year, and missed or failed
to disclose that the study only looked at wealthier dudes and dudettes? Dude!
6. 23 minutes = 5 minutes
Result: Sanders goes from
highlighting his opposition to racism and sexism to “not mentioning”
them.
In March, MSNBC’s Alex
Whit hosted a panel to discuss Bernie Sanders’ May 2 campaign kickoff
speech. Panelist and MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell
said: “I clocked it. He [Bernie Sanders] did not mention race or gender until
23 minutes into the speech.”
As Sanders surrogates, journalists,
organizers, activists and people on Twitter pointed out, Sanders most
definitely mentioned race and gender five minutes into his speech, when
he said “the underlying principles of our government” will “not be racism,
sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and religious bigotry.” Sanders starts his
speech 31 seconds after he gets on stage so, to be charitable to his critics,
he doesn’t mention gender or race until 5:31.
Maxwell, a former Hillary
Clinton staffer, though MSNBC didn’t mention that when they
introduced her, did delete a tweet which had said, “OK 23 minutes in Bernie
finally mentions race and gender.” But she was far
from contrite:
I’ve rewatched since yesterday
and while I can acknowledge that I missed the passing line at 6 minutes I stand
by my point since talking about criminal justice is not the same thing as
talking about race and gender and if you don’t get why Bernie won’t win….again.
Sanders spoke about race and
gender outside of the context of criminal justice, which anyone who watched or
rewatched the speech would know. But accuracy seems not seem not to be the
point so much as it is putting down a candidate who makes your “skin crawl,”
for reasons that you can’t quite explain. Citizens, including the ones MSNBC claims
to speak for, deserve better.
You can contact MSNBC by
calling 212-664-4444, or via Twitter: @MSNBC. Please remember that respectful
communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message
in the comments thread of this post.
You can listen to Halper talk
to pollster and Sanders advisor Jim Zogby about the misuse of polls on her
podcast here:
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