Bernie Sanders’ Trump-like criticism of the Washington Post highlights his deep-seated animosity toward the press that, at times, turns into hostility.
At a presidential campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday, the Vermont senator linked unfavorable coverage in the Washington Post to his criticism of Amazon. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns the paper.
Sanders noted that he talks about Amazon paying no federal income taxes “all the time.”
“And then I wonder why The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon, doesn’t write particularly good articles about me,” Sanders said. “I don’t know why. But I guess maybe there’s a connection. Maybe we helped raise the minimum wage at Amazon to 15 bucks an hour as well.”
Commentators and analysts were quick to note that President Trump has similarly criticized the paper’s coverage, calling it the “Amazon Washington Post.” The paper says that Bezos has no influence on its coverage.
Sanders’ media criticism is, in a sense, an extension of his socialist ideology. Sanders, 77, is known for decrying stories about candidates’ and officeholders’ personal characteristics and horse race political coverage as “gossip.” He prefers to talk about policy issues and proposals such as a single-payer “Medicare for all” healthcare system and reluctance to change his message to earn more press.
In an op-ed published about 40 years ago, Sanders floated the idea of television stations “democratically owned and controlled by the people” and called to “address the control of television as a political issue.”
“Television is the major vehicle by which the owners of this society propagate their political points of view (including lies and distortions) through the ‘news,'” Sanders wrote.
He expressed a similar sentiment in a 1988 speech, during his first House race, which he lost. “The function of private media is to make money for the people who own the media,” said the then-Burlington, Vermont mayor. “You can be damn sure that when you own and control this country, you own and control the media.”
Sanders’ critique of the press runs deep in its campaign infrastructure, reflecting his media relations approach during his 16-year career in the House and then the Senate starting in 2007. The Sanders campaign has created its own “shows” livestreamed on Facebook and on Twitter through Periscope that cover what it believes the national press won’t.
Nina Turner, Sanders campaign national co-chairwoman and a former Ohio state senator, brought up coverage of a Washington Post/ABC Democratic primary poll in an episode of “Nina NOW.” The poll found Sanders in second place with 23% support while former Vice President Joe Biden had 29%. Turner said that the poll showed Sanders “within striking distance of the vice president” but complained that headlines about the poll “did not reflect that.”
In one edition of The 99, a reference to those in the bottom 99% of wealth and income, Sanders campaign staffers asked, “Is Bernie too consistent for the corporate media?”
“On TV, you have millionaires paid by billionaires to present information,” Sanders campaign chief of staff Ari Rabin-Havt said.
At times, the Sanders team’s criticism of political media and corporations sometimes crosses over into hostility.
At the Iowa State Fair on Sunday, Sanders campaign staffers and event security repeatedly shoved and grabbed members of the press surrounding Sanders as he made his way through the venue. Last month, he complained when one of his staffers apparently leaked disagreements and details about union negotiations to the Washington Post.
According to political writer Paul Heintz of Vermont alternative newspaper Seven Days, Sanders for more than two years through 2017 refused to give interviews to several local Vermont news outlets that at the time aggressively covered the story of his wife Jane O’Meara Sanders’ presidency of Burlington College. The college closed in 2016 due to financial troubles and in 2017 the FBI investigated, but later dropped, allegations of bank fraud relating to a $10 million loan for a land purchase.
Sanders has on occasion, however, taken action in response to the kind of “gossip” stories he disdains. In January, Sanders publicly apologized to women who said that they faced sexual harassment or mistreatment while working on his 2016 campaign.
