Newly unearthed tapes from Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders’ time as mayor show a great distrust for the media.
In 1981, Sanders won the mayoral race as an independent candidate against an incumbent Democrat, entering the Burlington, Vt., city hall an avowed socialist.
While in office, Sanders started a cable access television series titled “Bernie Speaks with the Community,” tapes of which were recently found by Politico, to circumvent a skeptical media.
“I said to some of my colleagues, ‘We can’t survive. We’re going to have to develop our own media,’” Sanders said in one episode. He went on to complain that there were no major progressive news media to speak of at the time.
“Television is a better way to manipulate people’s minds than through books. And it’s good to have illiteracy, and that’s probably why we have it,” Sanders said in another episode.
Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, downplayed his comments as criticism of local media.
“When Bernie Sanders became mayor, he took on the entirety of the local establishment. The local mainstream media was dead set against him,” Weaver said. “I think he understood, correctly, that if he was going to have a way to talk directly to people about what he was trying to accomplish in Burlington, he was going to do that himself.”
The weekly episodes covered a variety of subjects, from President Ronald Reagan to Burlington’s trash dump and property taxes to the nuclear apocalypse.
While Sanders appears to have been an early adopter of media criticism, President Trump makes headlines with it, routinely criticizing television and print media as “fake news” during his 2016 presidential campaign and as president.
