NY Times Critiques Bernie Sanders' Critique of Corporate News Media
I guess it's a sign of progress that NYT.... which has consistently found it painful to say anything positive about the Sanders movement.... has gotten around to even acknowledge that the senator *has* a critique.
FWIW: The headline of the hard copy version of this ( published Wednesday) reads: "News Media Is Part of the Establishment Sanders Rails Against." Suggesting , I guess that ole' Bernie is some kind of "off the rails" left-wing equivalent of George Wallace or Spiro Agnew. ( Sorry, kids: famed RW demagogs of the late sixties.) They softened it up a little in the online version. Those old softies!
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More than three decades before he became a familiar face on Sunday morning shows, cable television news and the late-night comedy circuit, Bernie Sanders made no secret of his contempt for commercial TV.
It was not just a profit-making enterprise, he wrote in a 1979 issue of The Vanguard Press, an alternative weekly, but an opiatelike vehicle to subjugate the masses with “lies and distortions.”
And that was just the news programs. Commercials, he went on, employed “Hitlerian” tactics in which the public is “bombarded” with short, simple messages in keeping with the owners’ mission to “create a nation of morons who will faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate.”
He may have softened his language, but Mr. Sanders’s critique of the news media, as in nearly everything else, has remained constant as he has risen over the last 40 years from radical protester and protest candidate to mayor, congressman, senator and now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. Despite the advent of the Internet, the diminishing of traditional news media companies and the emergence of new media Goliaths like Facebook that have helped fuel his rise, Mr. Sanders remains orthodox in his mass media doctrine.
Antagonism toward the news media is, of course, the standard posture for politicians, especially insurgent candidates. Republicans frequently try to prove their conservative bona fides by bashing the “liberal media,” and Barack Obama tried to circumvent the press filter with his own website. But Mr. Sanders’s dim view of the “corporate media,” as he refers to it, is much more than a campaign tactic; it is a pillar of his anti-establishment, socialist worldview.
On the night of the New Hampshire primary, Mr. Sanders proclaimed that his victory would send “a profound message to the political establishment, to the economic establishment and, by the way, to the media establishment.”
With that, the crowd at his victory party roared “Bernie, Bernie, Bernie” as it turned to jeer the assembled news media.>>>>>>
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/24/us/politics/bernie-sanders.html?_r=0
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