As Bernie Sanders gains in the polls, journalists unleash negative coverage

There are both simple and complicated reasons for this.

The simple reasons include that members of the press merely want a different candidate to win the Democratic nomination and that news outlets are more than happy to print whatever juicy drama (see: gossip) competing 2020 campaigns feed reporters.

As Sanders is way, way up in the polls, it only makes sense that competing campaigns would work especially hard to get unflattering stories to reporters. We saw this earlier this month when the Warren campaign fed CNN a dubious story alleging that Sanders claimed in a private conversation in 2018 that a woman could not win the presidency.

The more complicated reason is that the Democratic establishment and its allies in the news media are worried a genuine agent of change may win the party’s nomination. There is, therefore, a greater push to flood newsrooms with as many anti-Sanders narratives as possible. Democrats saw what happened to the GOP establishment in 2016 with the rise of President Trump. He remade the Republican Party in his own likeness, casting off entrenched personnel and replacing them with operatives loyal to his populist agenda. It is an act of self-preservation, then, for members of the Democratic establishment to block something similar from happening to them in 2020.

It is like the last Democratic primary all over again for the Vermont senator, having party operatives conspire to thwart his chances at the nomination.

At the Washington Post this week, journalists Craig Timberg and Isaac Stanley-Becker reported a shocking revelation: Sanders’s supporters use social media to mock and criticize the senator’s opponents.

“Sanders supporters have weaponized Facebook to spread angry memes about his Democratic rivals,” reads the title, adding in the subhead, “Users are using mass-posting technologies to flood Facebook with attacks on Elizabeth Warren and others.”

The New York Times reports elsewhere that Sanders supporters are vicious, mean people. Maybe they’ll be calling them “deplorable” soon.

“At the start of his 2020 bid,” the paper reports, “the Vermont senator told his supporters that he condemned bullying. Is it his problem if many don’t seem to listen?”

The report adds that “the power of his internet army has … alarmed Democrats who are familiar with its underside, experienced in ways large and small,” and that “top advisers — and often, Mr. Sanders himself — are acutely aware of the bile spread in his name.”

The article serves mostly to argue that Sanders is responsible for his followers’ behavior and that his attempts to reign in his fans do not count because his supporters are still mean and vicious.

Earlier, MSNBC broadcast a segment featuring a so-called body language expert who “proved” Sanders lied when he denied he ever told Warren a woman could not win the presidency.

That moment came, by the way, immediately after CNN sided with Warren in a “he said, she said” leaked to the outlet by the Warren campaign.

The sudden burst of negative coverage for Sanders should not come as too much of a surprise, especially when it comes from excessively pro-Warren journalists and editors at the Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN. After all, these organizations have tried hard these last few months to keep Warren’s flailing 2020 campaign afloat. It only makes sense that they would come out now with damaging stories against Sanders, as his success comes at Warren’s expense.

If you are the sort of person who enjoys watching Sanders get dragged over the coals, I suggest you enjoy it while it lasts. If Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, the press will dutifully go back to its default setting of focusing almost entirely on the Republican presidential candidate. Call it force of habit.