Recent coverage of presidential campaigns highlights how the interests of the political establishment, corporations and the press have become increasingly intertwined. Betraying a blatant disregard for journalistic integrity, the mainstream media — from print publications like The New York Times to cable news — takes it upon itself to effectively choose the winners and losers of an election that is almost 18 months away. I have little regard for the half-baked logic behind most conspiracy theories, but it is just as lazy to digest what you read without question as it is to believe the unorthodox without sufficient evidence. With this in mind, I believe a thorough examination of presidential campaign coverage uncovers a disturbing reality: that many in the media forgo their duty to the public (to provide reliable information on all major party candidates) and instead unethically diminish unconventional candidates whose ideas and positions represent a departure from the status quo.
You might not know it from the sparsity of coverage but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was the first declared challenger to Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. The media’s coverage of him has been unforgivably biased and disdainful. The Washington Post began its profile on Sanders by describing him as “an unlikely presidential candidate — an ex-hippie, septuagenarian socialist from the liberal reaches of Vermont who rails, in his thick Brooklyn accent, rumpled suit and frizzy pile of white hair, against the ‘billionaire class’ taking over the country.” While every other major party presidential candidate who has declared an intent to run has been featured on The New York Times’ front page, Sanders’ declaration of his candidacy was shunted to A21. Steve Hendricks, of the Columbia Journalism Review, pointed out how “ABC’s World News Tonight gave his announcement all of 18 seconds, five of which were allotted to Clinton’s tweet welcoming him to the race” while Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson, neither of whom have ever held elected office, were spared “the long-shot treatment.”
The media’s disparaging treatment of Sanders is a direct corollary to his candidacy’s emphasis on income inequality and America’s “slide into economic and political oligarchy.” His unabashed repudiation of a nation where “99 percent of all new income [goes] to the top 1 percent” and Super PACs run amok understandably scares economic elites who are using the mainstream media to pull out all the stops to delegitimize Sanders and his message.
Media bias is just as visibly pernicious in the Republican primaries. Fox News listed the results of 10 candidates (including Donald Trump) from a recent Quinnipiac Poll but omitted Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who placed sixth and fares better in head-to-head matchups with Clinton than alleged frontrunners Gov. Jeb Bush (R-FL) and Gov. Scott Walker (R-WI). Paul has been noted for his efforts to broaden the appeal of the GOP brand to cater toward independents, college-age voters and minorities by pushing for bipartisan criminal justice reform and a more cautious foreign policy. It is the latter that has provoked backlash from the political establishment and mainstream media. Apparently pointing out that spending trillions at constant war in the Middle East is a costly, failed policy is enough for The Wall Street Journal to pen as demagogic a headline as “Rand Paul Created ISIS.”
This is not a new phenomenon, however, as the media was arguably even more scrupulous in its concerted dismissal of former Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) in 2008 and 2012. In the run-up to the 2012 presidential primary season, Paul came 152 voters short of winning the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa but astoundingly, a POLITICO headline read “Michele Bachmann wins Ames Straw Poll, Tim Pawlenty gets third." A Wall Street Journal editorial may have acknowledged his second-place finish but presumptuously wrote: “Libertarian Ron Paul, who has no chance to win the nomination, finished a close second.” Paul went on to place third in Iowa, second in New Hampshire and third in the total delegate count of the entire primary season.
Perplexingly relentless coverage of pizza magnate Herman Cain perhaps worked as a sideshow to divert attention away from Paul’s outspoken advocacy for a noninterventionist foreign policy. Paul’s message — that we need to drink upstream from the herd in the pool of common sense and independent thought — no doubt scared the military-industrial complex, whose foothold in the political establishment and media, just over a decade ago, manipulated public opinion into supporting the nebulously named War on Terror which has killed thousands of American troops, accrued trillions of dollars of debt and precipitated the steady loss of civil liberties at home.
This litany of appalling media biases has corrupted journalism to the point where fair coverage of presidential elections is a luxury among mainstream media outlets. The political union of the Washington establishment, corporate interests and the media has created an environment in which it is political suicide for a candidate to so much as question the status quo in foreign policy or income inequality. As both Pauls have learned, criticizing disastrous Middle East policy will place you squarely in the crosshairs of the kingmaker of American elections — the mainstream media. As Bernie Sanders is by now no doubt aware, underscoring the injustice of a system where 0.1 percent of Americans own more wealth than almost the bottom 90 percent combined will give political and economic elites every reason to order relentlessly distortive media coverage on your fledgling campaign. Unethical and biased media coverage of presidential campaigns only strengthens Sanders’ argument that no law (and apparently no campaign) succeeds “unless it has the OK of corporate America.”
Ben Rudgley is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at b.rudgley@cavalierdaily.com.
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