The New York Times Takes its Anti-Sanders Agenda to Next Level, Posts Mid-Campaign Obituary
Bernie Sanders has an incredibly important primary in Wisconsin tomorrow, and at this point in the campaign, it’s essentially a must-win. Which means that heading into today, we were 100 percent going to get a corporate media hit-piece on the candidate with the audacity to interrupt Hillary’s coronation. It came from the New York Times, which is no surprise—although for pure volume, they really can’t touch the pre-Super Tuesday output from the Washington Post.
Still, the Times came up with a pretty impressive new angle. Apparently, you see, the Bernie Sanders campaign is dead. Check out this headline:
Early Missteps Seen as a Drag on Bernie Sanders’s Campaign
Man, that Sanders guy sounds like he really screwed up! Totally lost it! Oh well, maybe next time!
But, uhhhh…they know he’s won 14 states, right? Just shy of Hillary’s 18? They know he’s won six of the last seven primaries? They now he’s now out-raised her in two straight months, and is on pace to break every fundraising record in the book? They know he’s never had more momentum, in the entire race, than right now? And they know he hasn’t dropped out, or conceded, or died, or turned Republican?
Apparently they known none of these things. The really interesting part of this article is how many subjects they got on the record from the Sanders camp, including his wife Jane, and top advisers Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine. I seriously doubt any of them would have agreed to participate if they had known the tenor of the final piece, which makes me wonder how this thing was pitched. I feel like full transparency wouldn’t have worked: “Hey guys, we’re doing a post-mortem on Bernie, even though he’s still in the campaign. Will you talk to us?”
We may never know how it went down, but we do know that the Times’ tried-and-true formula of covering its bases by saying something vaguely positive just before undermining it with a larger negative is in full force: