commondreams 12-3-16

[. . .]

We hadn’t seen Bernie Sanders in Philadelphia since last July, when he watched his primary opponent, Hillary Clinton, win the Democratic Party’s nomination. Sanders joined the “Democracy Now!” news hour this week at the historic Philadelphia Free Library for a wide-ranging discussion. “I am deeply concerned about the future of American democracy,” Sanders told the enthusiastic standing-room-only crowd. Millions of Americans voted for Sanders in the primaries. He transformed the 2016 U.S. presidential election, inspiring and engaging people with a progressive vision for the future, with little help from the media.

The networks have engaged in endless “mea culpas” in the election’s aftermath, contrite about their reliance on faulty polls. Rarely do you hear a news personality on television admitting that they failed miserably in covering the Sanders campaign. The U.S. media effectively iced out a major-party candidate who consistently held the largest rallies, even without a media megaphone.

Donald Trump received blanket coverage. His every move, every tweet, almost all his speeches were covered across the networks. The U.S. corporate media made candidate Donald Trump. Estimates of the free airtime he received vary from $1 billion to as high as $3 billion.

What about Bernie Sanders? The Tyndall Report analyzed major-network campaign coverage in 2015. In over 1,000 minutes of national broadcast television airtime devoted to all the campaigns, Donald Trump received 327 minutes, or close to one-third of all the campaign coverage. Bernie Sanders received just 20 minutes. Hillary Clinton got 121 minutes of campaign coverage, six times the amount Sanders received. “ABC World News Tonight” aired 81 minutes of reports on Donald Trump, compared with just 20 seconds for Sanders.

"While the media may not have been interested in Sanders’ message, the voters were. Despite the media blackout, Sanders won 23 primary contests and 46 percent of the pledged Democratic delegates."
I asked Sanders what he did to warrant a full 20 seconds of coverage on ABC, and he threw his head back, laughing out loud. “We had the misfortune of actually trying to talk about the problems facing America and providing real solutions,” he said, offering his take on the media’s failure. “Trump was tweeting out about how ugly or horrible or disgusting or terrible his opponents were, in really ugly terms.

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bold added.

It's like.. What-IF.. that lunatic didn't assassinate Archduke Ferdinand/starting WW-I (even just a lousy shot would UNdo the carnage we all know).

(A lengthy and informed discusson at KOS, for link): a catalog of the 'false-flag' and other memes as invented 'Bernie Bros'-as-epithet ... and similar--amidst ∑-Sanders' followers; the TLAs-list IS mind-boggling: you need to triply 'verify' whether it's a Putin's-boyz thing, or variation of Tricky Dick Nixon's boys: writing every riposte.

It seems that some of the smarter, long-term KOS folk attended this seance. Half-hour to distill the meat, some time wasted outing a couple shills withinin This opus(!) Learned a bit from the old-timers re Bernie et al, but lack the stamina to do many of these: Language Murther has become virtually the dis-US lingua franca :-/ ...and we have yet to see what $1B of Drumpf-AD-nausea shall next blanket 50 States.

BECAUSE: NONE of his lot would spend (my mere half-hour) ... researching: in all the remaining months.

Ahead? B l e a k . . . I wot.