Podcast: Play in new window | Download ()
Subscribe: Android | RSS | More
It’s bad enough for Bernie Sanders that his campaign workers united to demand a wage that keeps food on the table.
Now, apparently, he’s fighting with his ideological brethren at MSNBC, propaganda ministry for the hard Left. Sanders’ campaign said the Pink Ladies over at MSNBC don’t tell the “gospel truth.”
As the subheadline over the Daily Beast story put it, “The Vermont senator’s campaign sees the cable news network as part of a brewing problem that allows vague and unverified claims to go unchecked on air.”
Not “Pro-woman”?
Sanders’ people say “the network is one of several cable news outlets directly contributing to a media climate where false claims go unchecked and requests for progressive voices on-air are frequently turned down,” the Daily Beast reported.
Said Nina Turner, co-chair of the Sanders campaign, “More often than not these commentators are injecting their opinion without any policy discussions. They’re not there to tell the gospel truth.”
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
One of the MSNBC analysts who is irking Sanders, Mimi Rocah, unbosomed herself of an opinion about Sanders: The old socialist, she huffed, is not a “pro-woman candidate.”
Uh-oh.
“Bernie Sanders makes my skin crawl,” Rocah started when discussing the lineup for the upcoming Democratic debate in Detroit, where Sanders will share a stage with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). “I can’t even identify for you what exactly it is. But I see him as sort of a not pro-woman candidate,” she continued. “So, having the two of them there — like, I don’t understand young women who support him. And I’m hoping having him next to her will help highlight that.”
Rocah’s comments — which multiple campaign officials contended went too far — were part of a larger issue they see brewing, where the fact-checking process appears to be largely removed from the day-to-day political discourse among some commentators and hosts.
How one would “fact check” whether Sanders is “pro-woman” is unknown, even if he did make his first wife live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and even if his 2016 campaign did have a major problem with sexual harassment. But the Sanders campaign struck back on Twitter.
Briahna Joy Gray, Sanders’ minister of information, tweeted that “it takes a certain kind of woman to ignore that education, healthcare, and the economy are women’s issues too. #privilegedmuch? This is not what intersectional feminism looks like. It’s corporate feminism at its finest. Full stop.”
Belén Sisa, Sanders’ Latino press secretary, got all racial about it: “Here we go again. It is so belittling to constantly tell young women that they HAVE TO vote for someone JUST BECAUSE THEY’RE A WOMAN. Mam, we have brains, we’re voting on policy and a candidates vision + work, not their sex. This is #WhiteFeminism at its finest.”
Amusingly, the Daily Beast reported, “The campaign believes there are possible biases in the network” because it only features just a “small handful of guests closely aligned with Sanders who regularly appear,” which hampers his reaching the network’s viewers.
For its part, MSNBC’s spokesman stated the obvious: “A presidential campaign complaining about tough questions and commentary speaks for itself. Our anchors and analysts are doing their jobs: discussing day-to-day developments that have an impact on the race.”
Amusingly Sanders is more popular with viewers of Fox:
His message is going over better with an ideologically opposite cable news network. A recent Morning Consult poll found that Fox News viewers are more likely to support Sanders than those who prefer to watch MSNBC. According to the survey, 22 percent of Fox News viewers who identified as possible Democratic primary voters said they would back Sanders, as opposed to 13 percent of MSNBC viewers. That statistic was bolstered further by Sanders’ ratings during his own town hall appearance on Fox News, where more than 2.5 million viewers tuned in to hear Sanders make his case, according to Nielsen data.
Worker Uprising
But the fight with leftist MSNBC, which will undoubtedly support Sanders should he take the nomination, is the least of his problems. Sanders faces an uprising from campaign workers who claim they’re underpaid and can’t make ends meet.
They demanded a pay raise to what Sanders said should be the nationwide minimum: $15 an hour. Sanders told them to work fewer hours for the same pay and quit bellyaching.
Photo: AP Images
