The presidential campaign for Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont derided MSNBC for its coverage of his candidacy and claimed that Fox News has been less partisan in its coverage.
The commentary from the Sanders camp comes as a number of MSNBC hosts and contributors have taken shots at the front-runner despite performing well in early voting contents.
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Fox News has been “more fair than MSNBC,” Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, told Vanity Fair. “That’s saying something,” he said.
“Fox is often yelling about Bernie Sanders’s socialism, but they’re still giving our campaign the opportunity to make our case in a fair manner, unlike MSNBC, which has credibility with the Left and is constantly undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign,” Shakir added.
Shakir also addressed how MSNBC portrays the independent senator’s support base.
“You can feel the disdain they have for Bernie Sanders’s supporters,” Shakir said. “It’s a condescending attitude: ‘Oh, they must not be that intelligent. They’re being deluded. They’re being conned. They’re all crazy Twitter bots.’ My view is that there’s a bit of detachment from MSNBC and the people who this campaign gets support from. It feels like they’re covering progressives from an elitist perspective.”
MSNBC did not respond to a request for comment to respond to Shakir.
The number of incidents that have riled up the Sanders campaign has grown in recent weeks. Last month, MSNBC host Joy Reid had a body language expert on her show who claimed that Sanders’s posture proved that he was “lying” with regard to a viral moment on the debate stage between him and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.
On the day of the Iowa caucuses, network anchor Chris Matthews declared that Sanders is “not going to be president” and compared him to Sen. George McGovern from South Dakota, who won only one state and Washington, D.C., against incumbent President Richard Nixon in 1972.
Days later, Matthews again criticized Sanders, saying, “I have my own views of the word socialist, and I’d be glad to share them. … They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War.”
Sanders’s campaign is not the first presidential campaign to be angered with the liberal-leaning network.
Before dropping out last week, entrepreneur Andrew Yang demanded an apology for what he viewed as poor treatment by MSNBC. Yang was displeased with the way November’s presidential debate, which was hosted by the network, took place and how they also omitted him from several on-air graphics.
