Take our short survey: tell us how you
feel the corporate media is covering this campaign, and how you feel they cover
the issues facing this country. This is an issue that needs to be discussed.
David
-
Let's
discuss an issue that gets far too little attention — for obvious reasons.
In our
campaign we are taking on Wall Street, the insurance companies, the
pharmaceutical industry, the fossil fuel companies, the military industrial
complex, the prison industrial complex and the 1 percent. In other words, we
are taking on the corporate elite and the billionaire class who exercise
enormous power over the economic and political life of the country.
It is
no shock to me that the big networks and news organizations, which are owned
and controlled by a handful of large corporations, either barely discuss our
campaign or write us off when they do.
When
we trail in a poll, it gets endless coverage.
When a
poll is great for us, it barely gets a mention.
When
someone out-raises us in fundraising, it’s non-stop news.
When
we have the most donations by far, of any other candidate, here comes the
coverage about who has the most “crossover donors,” whatever that means.
We’ve
said from the start that we will have to take on virtually the entire media
establishment in this campaign, and so far that has proven to be true.
Ok.
Fine. We are ready.
But
even more important than much of the corporate media’s dislike of our campaign
is the fact that much of the coverage in this country portrays politics as
entertainment, and largely ignores the major crises facing our communities.
In
fact, what I have learned from experience is that, as a general rule of thumb,
the more important the issue is to large numbers of working people, the less
interesting it is to the corporate media.
Sadly,
for the corporate media, the real issues facing the American people — poverty,
the decline of the middle class, income and wealth inequality, trade, health
care, climate change, education etc. — are fairly irrelevant.
And
sadly, when they do cover issues like Medicare for All, it is almost always
about the polling or if the issue makes someone more or less electable. Very
rarely is there discussion about why we spend twice as much per capita as other
industrialized nations for worse outcomes while the health care industry made
$100 billion in profits last year.
Or if
the conversation does happen with any depth, it is almost always framed in
conservative terms and talking points — or the ostensibly Democratic viewpoint
shared by moderates from the party.
The
discussion is very rarely about what it will do for people’s lives or why
30,000 people a year die in America because they can’t afford to go to a doctor
when they should.
And
what we have to ask ourselves is why.
Why is
it that the corporate media sees politics as entertainment and largely ignores
the major crises facing our country and how candidates are addressing those
crises?
And
the answer lies, in fact, with something that is very rarely discussed, and
certainly not in the media: and that is that the corporate media is owned by a
small number of large media conglomerates.
In
1983 the largest fifty corporations controlled 90 percent of the media. That’s
a high level of concentration.
Today,
as a result of massive mergers and takeovers, only a few large corporations
like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Fox, Disney, Viacom, and CBS control the vast
majority of what we see, hear, and read. And there is news that Viacom and CBS
want to merge next.
This
is outrageous, and a real threat to our democracy.
Because
in case you haven’t heard, these corporations have an agenda that serves their
bottom line.
Take,
for example, Disney:
Disney,
the owner of ABC, makes its products in Chinese factories where workers are
paid only a few dollars per day under "nightmare conditions." And in
the United States, they have utilized guest worker programs to fire Americans
and replace them with lower wage foreign workers.
Further,
despite making huge profits, many of the people at their parks make low wages.
I was
proud to have worked with employees at Disneyland to raise their minimum wage
to $15 an hour, but more has got to be done.
Now I
could be wrong, but I don’t expect that you will see programming tonight on ABC
discussing the plight of low-wage workers here in the United States or, for
that matter, in China.
But if
you do watch TV tonight, check out how many ads come from drug companies,
insurance companies, the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street, and the rest of
corporate America. They even ran ads targeting Medicare for All during the CNN
presidential debate.
These
powerful corporations also have an agenda, and you can be sure it isn’t our
agenda.
Now,
Donald Trump thinks that media in America is the “Enemy of the people.”
To me,
that is an outrageous remark from a president which has the purpose of
undermining American democracy.
Because
the truth is, a knowledgeable and informed electorate is essential to a working
democracy, and the work of journalists in this country and abroad is absolutely
critical to our communities and to maintaining a free society.
So it
is my sincere hope that the coverage of this campaign generally, and our
campaign specifically, changes in the weeks and months ahead.
It is
my sincere hope that we can spend more time talking in-depth about the issues
facing the working people of this country and less time covering the latest
scandal or political gossip.
It is
my sincere hope that we have a more serious discussion about the real pain
working people, the elderly, the sick, and the poor are facing.
These
are not people with well-paid lobbyists who know how to manipulate the system.
These are people who struggle every single day but are almost always ignored by
the government.
You
follow the news more closely than most, so before I sign-off on this letter, I
want to hear from you:
Thank
you for sounding off and making your voice heard.
In solidarity,
Bernie
Sanders
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