When Propaganda Passes for Reporting:

The Case of Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York for his first campaign rally this primary season. Photograph by Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“One reason that propaganda often works better on the educated than on the uneducated is that educated people read more, so they receive more propaganda. Another is that they’re the commissars. They have jobs as agents of propaganda, and they believe it. By and large, they’re part of the privileged elite, and share their interests and perceptions.” — Noam Chomsky

By now, the pro-establishment bias of mainstream liberal media should be of no surprise to even the least attentive readers of newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post and viewers of outlets like CNN. And there is perhaps no better indicator of this bias than the way in which these outlets have covered Bernie Sanders. When Sanders launched his “political revolution” in 2015, the establishment liberal media responded with a counterrevolution that produced constant denunciations of Sanders as everything from unelectable to sexist to racist to fanatical. This counterrevolution continues to this day.

One of the best broad analyses of how the crusade by the establishment liberal media…