The pundit class continues to misunderstand Bernie Sanders - and it shows [View all]

[Uncle Joe]

(snip)

In part, the media underestimates Bernie because it can’t understand Bernie. The new ad quotes CNN’s Nia-Malika Henderson saying it’s “really hard to imagine who the Bernie Sanders voter is at this point”. And it’s true: if you are, like Henderson, a Yale graduate living in Washington DC, or you are, like the New York Times’ Sydney Ember, a former financial analyst for an investment bank, the source of Bernie’s appeal must be mystifying. That’s because Sanders returns again and again to issues that are of little interest to the political media, like environmental policy, social welfare, and education.

Consider MSNBC. Combing through their home page a few days ago, I found that nearly every story was about Trump, Ukraine and impeachment. The one headline about climate change, an issue so important that it should be dominating every day’s deadlines, was “Watch London climate change protest involving 1,800 liters of fake blood go horribly wrong,” hardly a substantive discussion of science or policy.

(snip)

If you see MSNBC as “the left” and Fox as “the right”, then Bernie Sanders must be some strange aberration that doesn’t make sense. In fact, he’s just a person with a well-refined sense of what matters and what doesn’t. Sanders has been accused of mirroring Donald Trump in his scathing attacks on the media. But while Trump’s objection to the media is that they spend too much time exposing his crimes and lies, Sanders’ objection is that they don’t elevate the voices of ordinary people and they don’t inform the public about the most important issues.

(snip)

The reason the media doesn’t understand Sanders, then, is in part that they do not understand the problems he is speaking about or why they matter. To cover him fairly would require them to re-examine their entire values and priorities. And that wouldn’t be good for ratings.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/oct/08/the-pundit-class-continues-to-misunderstand-bernie-sanders-and-it-shows

This is a good read.