Why the Media Lies about Bernie Sanders

Why has the corporate mainstream media waiting for Bernie Sanders to slip on banana peel, and lose the Democratic nomination? Why have they been lying about poll results? Why are they always pushing the "socialist" moniker the way Anderson Cooper did when he red-baited Bernie in the last debate? In one short sentence: Because, not only would Bernie raise their taxes if he could, but also because Bernie has always been strongly against the TPP trade agreement — something which the media giants support. So yes, the taking heads on TV will lie.

Nobody (or very few) media pundits are saying that Hillary Clinton didn't give a good performance during the first Democratic debate. According to her, she debated Obama 25 times during the 2007/08 primary season — so she did have a lot experience in the skill of debating — and she spent a lot of time with experts in preparation for her last debate.

But just being a great debater (or a great orator like Obama) doesn't do anything to rectify the problem of income inequality — it's integrity, authenticity, honesty, character, and someone's historical stand on the issues that matters much more. If you compared where Hillary stands and where Bernie stands on the issues, they are a world apart on some of the most major issues — such as Social Security, for example.

But maybe if some of the other candidates hadn't been on stage with Hillary and Bernie, and the moderators didn't hammer them with right-wing talking points, maybe the public could have drawn a more defined contrast between the two on the issues — with more give-and-take on the details of the different issues.

But as to who "won" the last the debate, personally (IMHO) I believe Bernie did. But should you have any doubts, I'd suggest that, instead of just believing me (or the mainstream media), that you see the video further below — and read this post: Bernie won all the Focus Groups & Online Polls, so why is the Media saying Hillary won the debate?

What the public wants out of a candidate, and what the beltway press wants, appear to be two entirely different things.

Who “won” a debate is inherently subjective. The idea of winning a debate necessarily entails a goal to be achieved. What this goal is, therefore, says as much about the person judging its achievement as the goal itself. Pundits are ostensibly supposed to judge whether or not a candidate said what "the voters” want to hear. But what ends up happening, invariably, is they end up judging whether or not the candidate said what they think voters wanted to hear. This, after all, is why pundits exist, to act as a clergy class charged with interpreting people’s own inscrutable opinions for them. The chasm between what the pundits saw and what the public saw was even bigger than usual last night.

Bernie Sanders by all objective measures "won" the debate. Hands down. I don’t say this as a personal analysis of the debate; the very idea of "winning" a debate is silly to me. I say this because based on the only relatively objective metric we have, online polls and focus groups, he did win. And it’s not even close.

Sanders won the CNN focus group,the Fusion focus group, and the Fox News focus group. In the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters. He won the Slate online poll, CNN/Time online poll, 9News Colorado, The Street online poll, Fox5 poll, the conservative Drudge online poll and the liberal Daily Kos online poll. There wasn’t, to this writer's knowledge, a poll he didn’t win by at least an 18-point margin. But you wouldn’t know this from reading the establishment press. The New York Times, the New Yorker, CNN, Politico, Slate, New York Magazine, and Vox all unanimously say Hillary Clinton cleaned house. What gives?

* Read the entire post here — which more or less confirms what I had also observed in my post when I wrote: Polls show Bernie Sanders won first debate — by a landslide!

And if that doesn't convince you, watch The Young Turks discussing this at YouTube: Media Swears Hillary Won Debate. Every Poll Says Bernie.

But I just read at the Huffington Post that their HuffPost/YouGov Poll (based on 1,000 votes) showed a 55 percent majority of registered Democratic voters who watched the debate said Clinton won — and that Bernie Sanders was a distant second with only 22 percent. They also reported that "before the debate, 44 percent of registered Democrats said they wanted Clinton to be the nominee. After the debate, the figure had risen to 52 percent." The Huffington Post also cited a NBC/Survey Monkey poll that showed a similar result.

But at Democrats.Com poll (with almost 73,000 votes) shows that, while Hillary has gained since the debate, she still lags far behind Bernie.

Hillary Clinton before the debate 21% - and 32% after debate.
Bernie Sanders before debate 50% - and 48% after debate.

Media Manipulation

Do you wonder why what the media pundits say and what the poll results show differ so much? Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion on June 23, 2015 — so Verizon now owns the Huffington Post. Verizon likes the TPP trade deal. Comcast bought NBCUniversal (NBC, MSNBC, etc.) on March 19, 2013. Afterwards, Comcast ordered MSNBC to remove anti-TPP hosts — and that's why Ed Schultz was fired. In his very last show on MSNBC, Ed bashed Hillary Clinton on the TPP trade deal (where I write about it here). Hillary Clinton has always supported and pushed the TPP trade deal. It wasn't until ONLY RECENTLY that she is now claiming to be against it. Senator Bernie Sanders has ALWAYS been against the TPP trade deal. So now we can understand why a Huffington Post or a NBC "poll" would show Hillary beating Bernie in the last debate.

Bernie Sanders had said:

"If I slipped on a banana peel leaving here, it would be on the front page of the papers. But when we talk about the great crisis facing this country, it's very hard to get media attention for a lot of obvious reasons. And if I was standing here tonight and making some vicious attack against Hillary Clinton, or anybody else, it'd be a front page story. But if we talk about why the middle class is disappearing and almost all new wealth is going to the top 1 percent, not a big story. So what the political revolution is, is forcing a debate. Not about trivial, but the real issues."

But maybe Donald Trump (who has been leading in the GOP polls) is taking Bernie much more serious than the media. (Yahoo):

Trump went after the independent senator from Vermont, who, like Trump, has defied political convention with his strong grassroots support and massive crowds. The billionaire businessman said the self-described "democratic socialist" should instead be called a "socialist-slash-communist" and blamed him for pushing Hillary Rodham Clinton further to the left in her policy positions during Tuesday night's first Democratic debate. "She's got to give everything away 'cause this maniac that was standing on her right is giving everything away, so she's following. We have to be careful."

Is Trump also Feeling the Bern?