Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Media Fail: California Edition

In a primary season littered with bad journalism, the California primary may take the cake. To recap: Bernie Sanders basically moved to the Golden State, campaigned there non-stop, received his typical fawning coverage based on campaign rallies he held almost exclusively on college campuses, benefitted from hours of TV time where pundits suggested he could win the state, and STILL lost to Hillary Clinton by 13 points. The morning after the election, you would barely know that the media had spent the preceding three weeks hyping his prospects or that he lost in a landslide.

Although awful, the media fail is of a piece with how they have covered the Clinton/Sanders primary race. Clinton fought Sanders with one hand tied behind her back while he swung away with both fists. Other than her (accurate) attacks on Sanders’s position on gun manufacturer liability, the Clinton team spent little time on negative campaigning against him; her Super PAC literally spent no money going after Sanders. Meanwhile, he dug in with gusto against her until the final day of the campaign.

The conventional wisdom was that Clinton supporters were not as enthusiastic as Sanders supporters. Not only was that demonstrably false, but in the place enthusiasm actually matters – the polling booth – her final margin of victory will end up being close to 4 million votes, a massive victory. That Hillary won 8 of the last 11 primaries and caucuses and 14 of the last 20 would suggest she has plenty of momentum and enthusiasm, but most of the coverage leading into California speculated about how damaging a loss there would be. When the media could not find any equivalency in delegates or votes, they tried to lean on “states won” – as if the Utah caucus was the same as prevailing in Pennsylvania, Florida or Texas – but even there, the Sanders team came up woefully short.

The kid gloves Sanders was treated with by Clinton were largely shared by a media horde that consistently drooled over his rallies but did little probing of his actual policies. What little negative press he received was of his own making – an awful editorial board meeting with the New York Daily News and his claim that Clinton was unqualified to be President – stemmed from his own lack of preparedness and tin ear. Meanwhile, in the run up to both the New York and California primaries, his campaign received oceans of positive coverage based on the size of his crowds, but when he lost each, there was little after action reporting on why that excitement did not translate into wins.

Bernie’s appeal was always based more on myth than fact. Of the 10 most populous states in the nation, Sanders only won one, and by less than two percent (Michigan). Clinton beat Sanders by more than 100,000 votes 15 times, while Sanders only bested Clinton by that margin once. Clinton’s domination was so complete there were some counties where she outpolled Sanders by a greater margin than entire states he won. In New Jersey, her margin of victory in Essex County (47,622 votes) was greater than Sanders’s victory margins in all but four states (one of which was Vermont).

But for all of this, Bernie Sanders is still getting the softball treatment. The editorial board of the New York Times thinks Hillary has to convince Bernie’s supporters she did not cheat to win and everyone in the press corps is in agreement that he deserves a wide berth to nurse his wounds even as he stubbornly claims he will soldier on, notwithstanding the clear defeat he suffered. It is fitting that the media is giving him one last parting gift – on a night when he could have shown statesmanship by conceding to Clinton, urging his supporters to vote for her, or even simply acknowledging the historic nature of her being the first woman to clinch a major party’s nomination for President, he was defiant and refused to shush his supporters who booed her name, not that you will hear much about this in the press, they are too busy hand wringing over the additional concessions that must be made to soothe his wounded ego. 

Follow me on Twitter - @scarylawyerguy

6 comments:

  1. You're right. But in fairness, it's not just California. Generally, all media has been fawning over Bernie and Trump. As far as Trump is concerned, media essentially abandoned journalism. San Diego is my town. I might attend the Trump U hearings. But when Trump came to San Diego - it was as if media took a stupid pill.
    https://bonnierussell.wordpress.com/2016/05/28/trump-in-san-diego-media-coverage-chokes-and-bryan-pease/

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    1. I'm jealous - SD might be the nicest city in America. It's not just the double standards, it's the acknowledgement that they use the double standard that gets me, but hey, any time you have the temerity to criticize, you get blocked on Twitter or called a loser living in your mom's basement. Go figure.

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  2. FABULOUS piece (and you're really a great writer). It is important that Clinton's strong showing in the big states and the crescendo of her California win be acknowledged in light of the press clinging to their narrative that she's "flawed" and "imperfect." The only thing you left out was the self-inflicted Democratic whores episode ... There are so many places the Clinton campaign could have gone after him - and many think they should have shut him down earlier, to avoid this the need to deal with him at the end - but they calmly assessed the math hand let him roll on. He should be thankful he's been treated well by the more savvy political peers, but his speech last night showed his true colors. Thanks again.

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    1. The thing that gets me is that the media didn't even do any serious vetting of his ideas, which is why that NYDN Ed Board meeting was so jarring. It was like, wait, you don't even know the basics of a foundational part of your own argument regarding "the big banks." I would have loved for someone to ask him what would happen to the tens of thousands of workers in the health care industry if he instituted single payer or whether he would cap salaries for doctors and nurses. But of course, because the media never thought he could win the nomination, they didn't bother digging into his record or his ideas. Meanwhile, they would spend three days obsessing over the Clinton campaign using a moving rope line but ignore the fact that Trump is literally blackballing reporters from his events. Unfortunately, the only people more thin skinned than politicians are the reporters who cover them, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a collective mea culpa.

      Thanks for reading!

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  3. Great post. While the media was busy fawning over his 60k crowd in Oakland, actual voters in Alameda County were mailing in and voting for Hillary Clinton. She won it by 8 points. The media predicted he would win the Bay Area by 6 points and he lost the whole Bay Area, including his other big rally spots in San Francisco and San Jose.

    Of course his delusional followers blame the media for calling the race on Monday night. That doesn't explain her 20+ point lead in the early voting that had been done. That's another part of the story the MSM failed to talk about. They talked non-stop about it being neck and neck while failing to mention how much she was already up in early voting. He went into yesterday with a huge deficit and did not make it up.

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    1. Exactly. Same thing in NYC when MSNBC swooned over a rally held in Washington Square Park; meanwhile, he got crushed in Manhattan. I will hand it to him and his staff, they leveraged their optics to get a lot of sympathetic coverage but not just the quantity, but quality of his "wins" was far below what he deserved.

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