Calling out the partisan corporate press on its Bernie Sanders coverage…

It’s been very disappointing, over the past couple of months, to wait and see if coverage of Bernie Sanders’ campaign picks up at the New York Times. It hasn’t. Whereas you can read serious feature articles about him on Politico, The Hill, Mic.com, Time, The Guardian, Mother Jones, Democracy Now, nothing of any seriousness has been published at the Times. The few available NYT articles, for the most part, still make it a point of highlighting his age, early on in the piece. I wonder how loudly people would complain if the same were done with Hillary Clinton who, after all, is only six years younger.

The factual coverage, however, is what is most striking in its shoddiness and up-front hostility:

A search of Bernie Sanders 2016 turns up 13 campaign related articles. A search for Hillary Clinton campaign 2016 turns up 197 entries. Running the exact same search for Sanders turns up even fewer results. Go figure…

Two months into the Democratic primary, the timing and substance of an article such as the one below, stands out as a biased piece of reporting, when nothing much else is being put out by the Times in terms of coverage of the substance of Sanders’ stump speeches, when the perceived main contender has been receiving wide coverage on substance for some time now. This hardly qualifies as balanced. I mean, if it’s that difficult to send someone out to, say, Madison to cover Bernie’s speech to a crowd of 10,000 people, there is always YouTube…

This is an unacceptable standard for the nation’s paper of record.

POLITICS

Bernie Sanders’s Revolutionary Roots Were Nurtured in ’60s Vermont

By SARAH LYALLJULY 3, 2015

BURLINGTON, Vt. — When he came to Vermont in the late 1960s to help plan the upending of the old social order, the future presidential candidate Bernie Sanders brought with him the belief that the United States was starkly divided into two groups: the establishment and the revolutionaries. He was a revolutionary.

“The Revolution Is Life Versus Death,” in fact, was the title of an article he wrote for The Vermont Freeman, an alternative, authority-challenging newspaper published for a few years back then. The piece began with an apocalyptically alarmist account of the unbearable horror of having an office job in New York City, of being among “the mass of hot dazed humanity heading uptown for the 9-5,” sentenced to endless days of “moron work, monotonous work.”

“The years come and go,” Mr. Sanders wrote, in all apparent seriousness. “Suicide, nervous breakdown, cancer, sexual deadness, heart attack, alcoholism, senility at 50. Slow death, fast death. DEATH.”

Chalk some of this up to being young and unemployed. Mr. Sanders, now 73, has had a steady, nonrevolutionary job for quite some time now. […]