The photo the Washington Post chose to illustrate its contention that the paper wasn’t being too hard on Bernie Sanders. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
On Tuesday, FAIR published a straightforward recapping of 16 hours of Washington Post stories that displayed a remarkable run of negative articles about Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. The FAIR post and a corresponding tweet went viral: retweeted thousands of times, shared on Facebook and Reddit thousands more, and written up in TruthDig, The Young Turks, USUncut and the Daily Caller.
Due to this surge of coverage of our coverage of its coverage (yes, media criticism gets somewhat meta), the Washington Post (3/8/16) decided to respond to our criticism, staffing out the unenviable task to The Fix’s Callum Borchers, who gave us:
Has the Washington Post Been Too Hard on Bernie Sanders This Week?
Right off, the framing is inaccurate: The scope wasn’t “this week,” it was a 16-hour period after the Flint, Michigan, debate—and following a weekend in which Sanders won three of four state contests with Hillary Clinton. The do-or-die stakes for Sanders in Michigan couldn’t have been higher, and how one of the most influential newspapers in the United States covered his debate performance and his primary showing was important.
After arguing that working for the Washington Post would not impede his ability to show why the paper was in the right, Borchers begins by casting aspersions on Sanders conspiratorial partisans:
The notion of an anti-Sanders agenda clearly resonated—no surprise, given that the Vermont senator has complained about media coverage, generally, and the Post, specifically.
It doesn’t “resonate,” is the implication, because it’s actually true; it must be that Dear Leader has poisoned minds with thoughts of media conspiracy.
Borchers’ main effort is to narrow the definition of a “negative” story.
First, the definition of “negative” — in this case and in a lot of media griping — is overly broad. For example, the “negative” category, according to FAIR, included a story by The Fix‘s Philip Bump with the following headline: “Bernie Sanders Pledges the US Won’t Be No. 1 in Incarceration. He’ll Need to Release Lots of Criminals.”
Bump pointed out that to keep a campaign promise — “At the end of my first term, we will not have more people in jail than any other country” — Sanders would need to set free roughly a quarter of the United States prison population, or about 567,000 criminals.
Is that negative? I mean, it’s math.
At a moment when even the Koch brothers are coming out against overincarceration, a story that thumbnails it as “releasing lots of criminals” can indeed be considered a negative framing, if not more importantly one that shortchanges readers’ intelligence and understanding.
Still, note that “negative” is not intended as the opposite of “factual.” When the George Bush Sr. campaign focused on Michael Dukakis’ prison furlough program—the so-called “Willie Horton” issue—its attacks were nominally fact-based. Yet many people saw them as an unfair exploitation of racial fears, and it was relevant to address them on those terms.
Bigger picture: The reason the graphic and FAIR’s blog post went so viral is because people can intuitively look at a litany of stories over such a short period and see bias. Nature made us pattern-seeking mammals for a reason, and the Washington Post’s post-debate coverage displays an obvious pattern.
And Borchers doesn’t so much deny that pattern as attempt to justify it:
It is important, of course, that a newspaper’s opinion and analysis pieces reflect a range of perspectives. Overall, I can confidently say the Post‘s do. But if you’re going to take a one-day sample — on a day when Sanders was coming off a debate performance that was widely panned — you’re going to find a lot of opinion and analysis that reflects that consensus.
His evidence, though, is unpersuasive; for evidence that Sanders’ debating was “widely panned,” he links only to a piece by Salon’s Amanda Marcotte—author of such articles as “Why I’m Supporting Clinton Over Sanders” and “Let’s Storm the Sanders’ He-Man Women-Haters Club.”
It’s true that many corporate media pundits thought Sanders did poorly in the Flint debate, and that opinion was the content of many of the negative stories that FAIR highlighted. But that only spurs questions about the editorial choice to focus overwhelmingly on debate etiquette in a time period in which Sanders’ actual electoral performance included a victory in the Maine caucuses (announced during the Flint debate) and top pollings in two out of three states. The former reflects pundits’ opinions, while the latter reflects actual voters’ choices.
For a piece ostensibly intended to prove the Post unbiased, Borchers’ conclusion is problematic, in that it suggests that they are biased, but consider it compensatory:
Finally, even if we accept the idea that Post reporting, analysis and commentary combined to put Sanders through the wringer, I fail to see the inherent trouble. As I’ve written before, Sanders skated through the early portion of the primary season on stories about his “yuge” crowds and better-than-expected poll numbers. It was one of the perks of being an underdog.
Readers and voters don’t ask for media to use their coverage to offer “perks” or comeuppances to candidates as they see fit, but to render accurate coverage that reflects what voters are concerned about.
In this case, a dry-eyed reading suggests that the range of perspectives reflected by the Post‘s pundit roster simply does not include many people who identify with the challenge to the political establishment Sanders’ candidacy reflects—and considerably more people who feel an affinity with the network of political, economic and media elites who have thrown their support behind Clinton. That this should be reflected in their editorial decision-making is not particularly surprising, just worthy of consideration.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. Follow him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Question is did WaPo ever come close to publishing 16 negative Clinton or even Trump articles in one 16 hour period?
And additionally, this figure about “criminals” being released is so childish it’s ridiculous. Sanders wants to change the definition of the word “criminal” so it does not apply to petty offenders. Do people who get parking tickets qualify as “criminals”? No. Sanders wants petty offenders, like people caught with something like a gram of marijuana, to be released from prisons.
Maybe more importantly, Sanders wants to invest money in jobs and schools so people have other opportunities than crime, this has nothing to do with releasing people from prison, simply just making sure there are less people interested in committing crimes of any type.
“Bias”
“Bezos”
What’s in a name?
If you believe the Washington Post, there’s a bridge for sale, on Amazon, that you might want to consider purchasing.
Thank you to FAIR for starting the whole bandwagon rolling. You are right, the point is not if we should submit candidates for political office to scrutiny – it is the overreach of the media in a critical moment. It seems likely the editors smelled danger all the way from Michigan and threw balance out the window. To claim “Sanders skated through the early portion of the primary season on stories about his “yuge” crowds and better-than-expected poll numbers” is plain laughable. Yes he had big crowds. His poll numbers were better than WHO expected????? And, finally what stories, really? I have yet to see a story that mentions the growing and record turnouts for democrats on Super Tuesday and beyond. Whoops – that would be to take Sanders seriously, wouldn’t it?
If someone should call Herr Borchers an “asshole,” I hope he takes the comment in context: It’s the end of the alimentary canal, required for all healthy humans, and not the entire man.
Is that negative? I, mean, it’s anatomy!
Yet somehow Sander supporters have turned on the media and the DNC who feels that they are trying to turn this into a Hillary coronation rather then a election.
Let’s see how that works when it pushes them away from Hillary in November.
USA — PARADISE FOR EMPIRE BUILDERS
In case you haven’t heard, we live in the only nation on earth where the corporate rich own/fund all of mainstream media, where the corporate rich supply 90% of all political donations and where the corporate rich are allowed to hoard three-fourths of the nation’s wealth.
lol.. just like how the police investigate themselves and find no wrong doing!
Dumbasses…
Analyze the 16 writers one by one.
How many with financial ties. How many with intertwined history with politician/s. How many with ‘clearly biased’ posting history.
If they’re ‘investigating themselves’, investigate them independently.
WaPo refuses to face it has cultivated a culture of bias.
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2016/03/08/washington-post-ran-16-negative-stories-bernie-sanders-16-hours
I congratulate the WP for tacitly admitting that bias against Bernie Sanders would be inappropriate.
Why do younger people like Bernie? Because they don’t follow “traditional” (heavily right-wing manipulated) media & get less biased (non-politically weighted) information from the Internet, where factual veracity is self, rather than “authoritarian,” determined. I.e., if the main purpose of schools (despite being severely hobbled) is to prepare people to think for themselves, then they may have been doing just that.
WASHINGTON POST — 16 ANTI-SANDERS PIECES IN 16 HOURS
(1) As Empire USA incarcerates 25% of all prisoners on earth, most all of the impoverished laboring-class and mostly for non violent crimes, Bernie could with an executive order free over half of them.
(2) Clinton is running for president of the Bush-Obama Administration, Sanders is running for something better.
(3) Sanders speaks the truth, so Washington Post calls it a “catchphrase.”
(4) Mental Health Patients to Washington Post: Don’t compare us to GOP candidates.
(5) Pro-war Clinton, she never had a more gentle and respectful opponent then Bernie.
(6) Washington Post Two Big Lies About the Global Economy: That because only the ruling elite have the intelligence to understand the global economy, only they should control it.
(7) The reasons why Bernie Sanders won all of his Democratic Debates, surely they are too numerous to mention.
(8) The deep south has an awkward moment with Bernie Sanders, as they think that the laboring-class should be kept impoverished for the purpose of economical slavery.
(9) Bernie Sanders says that the white upper-half of society does not realize that a ghetto is reserved for “white trash” and blacks.
(10) The Washington Post does not know that the upper-half of society owns 99% of guns as they own 99% of wealth. Well they, they should ask their rich ruling class owners.
(11) Our population is so fed up with the Washington Post and their ruling-class dictatorship, only Bernie Sanders would win against Trump.
(12) Only if Bernie was pro-war, could he be at peace with a war loving Hillary who overthrew the best governments that Honduras, Libya and Ukraine ever had.
(13) Ask the Washington Post and they will tell you, the banks to big to fail made $2 billion in political donation to Obama because they thought an Obama Administration would keep the big banks honest.
(14) Carpet bomber Ted Cruz, surely he has nothing in common with “CUT MILITRY SPENDING” Bernie.
(15) Washington Post refuses to talk about black people unless they can degrade the black community with labels like “assailant… gunman… felon…”
(16) The most anti-partisan and anti-establishment candidate for President, surely he is Bernie Sanders.
The WaPo’s agenda has become ever clearer in recent decades. Fred Hiatt will frequently ‘balance’ a WaPo editorial calling for war or entitlement cuts with an oped stating the same case.
It’s corporate media, and they’re shameless.
~
Oh, puh-leeze. The Washington Post used to be a news organization with integrity, the source of valid information and a reasonable, reliable, often praiseworthy publication. No idea what has happened to the Post but Kay Graham would be horrified at the cheesy agenda the paper has adopted during this primary. If the Post really thinks it is providing objective and evenhanded coverage of the Sanders campaign, I’ve got some weapons of mass destruction just ripe for a WaPo exclusive. It’s a real pity you have decided Americans are a nation of gullible dupes. There’s a lot at stake in the 2016 election but you wouldn’t know it from reading this slanted rag.
Every debate performance by Sanders is “panned” because Clinton has so many allies in the establishment press.
The performance was also widely praised. This article is as demonstrative of the Post’s institutional bias as the 16 headlines that sparked this exchange.
It is a good thing FAIR does media criticism because the Post is not very good at it. Especially when they are analyzing their own work. The author of this Post article, also had a fallacious and mocking response where he said “look, the Post had 16 positive articles. It must be pro-Bernie bias” (paraphrase). But it was disingenuous to the core.
For starters, most of the 16 “positive articles” he cited were simply acknowledging that Bernie won in Michigan. The 16-hour stretch where they blasted Sanders was not after an historic Clinton victory. It was after a debate — a debate where Sander’s performed reasonably well (Michigan voters seemed to like it). It wasn’t perfect, but you could’ve easily published 16 articles pointing out Clinton dishonest attacks on the auto/TARP bailout, or her absurd answer to the Goldman transcript question.
What I find so interesting about this, is that one reason the propaganda function of the mass media is effective is because it is subtle. It creates the illusion that the press is adversarial to power, as opposed to being a tool of the powerful (and being owned by the super wealthy, who would not do as well under a Sander’s administration). But in this instance, they abandoned any pretext of subtlety and didn’t even try to present itself as a media outlet that encourages a wide array of perspectives. It just went into anti-Sanders overdrive.
My best guess is that it is a form of institutional panic. Sanders has “dragged” on the primary for too long and, in the eyes of the 1 percent (and the corporate media) he is overstayed his welcome. To some extent, this aberration from the normal output of the media (which is biased in favor of establishment candidates, and the wealthy, but far more subtle) is a reflection that Sander’s campaign is having some success. If Sanders were to pull off further upsets I would expect even more egregious displays (in addition to the more subtle displays of bias, which are detected by media critics who know what to look for but not so much the casual observer, who probably thinks the Post is liberal and is carrying on in the tradition of muckrackers like Woodward and Bernstein).
Hah ! The name of the article ” WAPO investigates itself “…… about the same as” Pick up the usual suspects “
Wrote up a response to WaPo here http://libcom.org/blog/washington-post-offers-pathetic-excuses-after-its-bias-exposed-11032016
The Washington Post is located INSIDE the DC beltway. I believe the problem is so full of hot air that the belt has become too constrictive thus the air is contaminated to the extent that all the truth in journalism has been squeezed out.
What happened to the comments section under the original story “Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders in 16 Hours” ? It seems to have vanished …
Al Jazeera English just covered it, so it now went well beyond the US :-): http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2016/03/tightening-grip-turkey-media-takeover-160312084959572.html
Well, I can be stubborn too, so here’s the AJE link, once more:
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2016/03/tightening-grip-turkey-media-takeover-160312084959572.html
If that too vanishes, look for the latest episode of “listening Post” on that channel. It can be found on internet.