Sen. Bernie Sanders said the media contributed to his failure to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
The Vermont senator and his campaign, which he suspended earlier this month, often sparred with members of the press and certain outlets during the primary season. Reflecting on his second White House bid to fall short in a Wednesday interview with CNN, Sanders alleged that the tension with the media contributed to his latest loss.
“I think what we saw from Nevada on out was a cry the rooftops, from the political establishment, from the media, that they wanted anybody but Bernie,” Sanders said. “My God, I don’t know how many articles there were about that. ‘We need anybody but Bernie,’ and you know they ended up succeeding. And that’s that.”
The socialist senator received negative coverage frequently from left-leaning network MSNBC, during the beginning of the primary season and when he performed well in early voting states. Sanders, in turn, often used the “corporate media” as an insult to describe his detractors in the press.
Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews, a vocal critic of the senator, apologized to him for comparing his victory in the Nevada caucuses to the Nazi invasion of France, reportedly prompting a Sanders blow-up at network executives and calls for “fairer coverage.”
After Sanders had a poor showing on Super Tuesday, foreshadowing how the rest of the primary season would go down, he also attacked the media.
“There has not been a campaign that has been having to deal with the venom by some in the corporate media,” he said a day after Super Tuesday. “This campaign has been compared to the coronavirus on television. We have been described as the Nazi army marching across France.”
