Media Blind Spots and the 2016 Democratic Primary Election Disasters

For Bernie Sanders’s sake, I truly do grieve about the blind spots in the Mainstream Media towards him, his ideas and his successes. I don’t know how he stands the unfair treatment by the oblivious press. He is a tough, thick-skinned guy from Brooklyn with the ideals of Gandhi, whom I have considered my personal hero for decades.

However, because I really can’t do much about these blind spots in American political journalism, I have to look at it as a kind of numbers game, which is balanced out by and made up for by the inherent integrity of social media journalism, particularly Facebook.

Blind spots in the media were described brilliantly by Robert Reich in the San Francisco Chronicle exactly one month ago in his Commentary “Sanders’ impact obscured by media’s blind spots”

Reich memorably wrote:

“Some Sanders supporters speak in dark tones about a media conspiracy against him. I doubt one exists. The mainstream media are incapable of conspiring with anyone or anything. They wouldn’t dare try. Their reputations are on the line. If the public stops trusting them, their brands are worth nothing.

“The real reason the major national media can’t see what’s happening is they exist inside the bubble of establishment politics, centered in Washington, and the bubble of establishment power, centered in New York. So they’re most interested in the personalities of the candidates, and in the people and resources backing them.”

Newspapers, in general, lose their relevancy and credibility every time they warp the truth, and they do excel at warping the news to continue and extend the larger scale blindsiding going on by the leadership at the Democratic National Committee, something like the Emperor’s New Clothes, and like lemmings about to jump off the cliff, and at times descending to the level the capos leading the victims to the gas chambers while the brass bands played on, the victims led to believe they were just going in for a shower. Yes, I think what is going on is almost that serious, and if you find this shocking, I am sorry to offend your sensibilities with such a grim historical analogy.

In this primary season, we have all seen rampantly abounding media blind spots in every corner of the United States, as if every journalist and editor had been offered some kind of bribe or incentive or hidden reward to “Tell it like it Isn’t.”

Since February 1, I have had minor successes with articles and letters published about Bernie Sanders in the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, the Baltimore Sun, the Los Angeles Progressive, the New York Daily News, the Albuquerque Journal, the East Arizona Courier, Indian Country Today, OpEdNews (my favorite), the Lafayette Indiana Courier Journal, Sioux City South Dakota’s Argus Leader, the Madison Wisconsin Capitol Times, the Baltimore Post-Examiner, and many others. Sounds like a lot, but truly? Never as many as I wanted, and perhaps only two percent of what I sent out.

By comparison, Charles Krauthammer, Cal Thomas, or Paul Krugman articles are carried in hundreds of newspapers. That’s the way it goes. If they say something you object to in a 1200 word article, there is maybe a  one percent chance that you will get 150 words to rebut them, and if there are hundreds of letters objecting to whatever they wrote, you have even less of a chance to air views and set the record straight.

In short, for whatever reasons unknown, the journalistic odds are loaded against Bernie. I saw this very early on, recognizing the modus operandi. I had studied all of the hundreds of editorial page endorsements for Obama in 2008, and as managing editor of my own paper had published 38 of the best of these endorsements ten days before his 2008 election. It was a very special edition of the New Mexico Sun News, called OBAMA WINS! That was ten days before the election. It caused quite a stir and was the top story on CNN for quite a few hours. It wasn’t a stunt at all; it was a solution to the problem of our paper coming out ten days before the election or four days after.

This year and in this election, the media is insidious, hostile, manipulative, and downright oblivious. It is as if they have lost every shred of higher motive and all concern for what tenuously survives by a thread of the American Democracy. The issue I have been so deeply concerned about, the  purging in the hijacked New York Primary, is of absolutely no concern among 99.5 percent of America’s editors.

The Bernie Facebook supporters, however, all seven million of them, are very concerned but very difficult to educate as to what to do about this monstrous theft that makes Watergate like stealing a paper clip off the teacher’s desk. As you may know, we have shifted the focus to asking US Attorney Preet Bharara of New York to take this request into Federal Court to obtain a ruling that the results of the stolen primary should first be de-certified and then another judicial order that the primary be repeated with safeguards and monitors. Leaving it stand as is will pollute and stain the Presidency and the very integrity of the constitutionality of our government.

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This is all by way of introduction to what I bring to your attention today. On the front page of today’s Wall Street Journal, right next to a photo of Muhammad Ali’s pink childhood home, is an article by Peter Nicholas of the Wall Street Journal‘s Washington bureau titled “Sanders Camp is Split Over Next Step.”

The article included updates from both candidates, plus a conciliatory quote from Campaign Adviser and former Monsanto lawyer, Tad Devine, about the two campaigns talking with each other in due course. It had also a more strident quote from Campaign Manager Jeff Weaver, who has worked on Bernie’s campaigns since the 1980’s.

“The plan is as the senator has described it: to go forward after Tuesday and keep the campaign going to the convention and make the case to super delegates that Sen. Sanders is the best chance that Democrats have to beat Trump.”

This quote was followed by dismal statements from Tom Daschle, Harry Reid, and even an absurd quote from William Daley, who chaired Gore’s Campaign and who served as Chief of Staff for Obama, saying that the “damage” Sanders could do is “overwhelming if he doesn’t give Mrs. Clinton the breather she needs in the run-up to the convention to take on Trump.”

My obvious questions right away were:
1. Where is the rest of the “Sanders Camp” in this article, besides the two who were quoted?
2. Did the reporter speak to others who got edited out?
3. Did someone else write the intentionally misleading headline for the front page of the second largest circulating paper in the United States?

Rather than hypothesize about the answers or write a furious polemic about this skewed journalism maybe not so far removed from being another Wall Street Journal “hatchet job,” I decided to call the office in DC and maybe speak to the editor, if I could, but turns out he wasn’t available, but the journalist, Peter Nicholas was available.

About all he could do when I asked those questions was reply several times that “the article stands on its own” and that “the article speaks for itself.” He also asked me three times, “did you read the article?”

Maybe this is how they are trained at the Wall Street Journalism School to deal with pesky questions. My approach was gentle, entirely polite, and non-confrontational. Mr. Nicholas would not say whether he had spoken with more than two members of the Bernie camp, and it almost sounded like HE had written the headline, or even improbably that someone had written the headline first and then he wrote the article to jive with the headline?! How could that be?

Wall Street is running so scared of Bernie. They have had a free run for several decades. That Bailout that we will be paying for for decades? With Bernie in the White House, all of that might have to come to an end. They are feeling besieged and attacked like never before, by United States Attorney Preet Bharara, with something like 82 convictions in a row of Wall Streeters, plus the President of the New York Senate and Speaker of the NY Assembly.

Their throne of corruption and greed is under siege and they are going all out to disrupt, discredit, and minimize our own pesky Bernie Sanders.

No matter how he does in the last primaries, we now have to focus on the crooked rigged super delegate system and on communicating with all of them. I choose to communicate through newspaper editorial pages and through news articles that may or may not ever appear.

The truth about the hijacked New York Primary has comes out. Will it go viral among the American public? I don’t just mean the 7 million Bernie Supporters on Facebook. If and when that happens, the jig will be up, unless 300 million Americans are totally inoculated against more Hillary scandals, or unless they consider stealing as many as ten primaries just part of normal political “shenanigans,” or that lovely euphemism for large scale larceny, “irregularities.”

This will either happen before the convention and the super delegates will do the right thing, jump ship, and switch to Bernie, or, if that fails to occur for whatever insidious reasons, then count on Trump, the Koch Brothers, the RNC, and god knows whatever other unknown giant Super PACs there are out there, to  combine forces, buy a half billion dollars worth of advertising in all media, to totally destroy Hillary and her legal baggage. You will be looking at shark chum, the ruins of the Democratic party, and two decades before it may or may not recover.

This is what Carl Bernstein was talking about just last week when he diplomatically stated that the top levels of the DNC and even the White House were “concerned” about Hillary’s “free fall in credibility,” and the apparent implosion of her campaign.

Mark my word: there will be massive complaints about the California primary and the dirty tricks used to change the outcome, but will the Californians shrug their shoulders and reply “Have a nice day”? Watch what Bernie says and does right after the California Primary closes, now that there is almost no one left to placate by avoiding “negativity” about how the other side has used every dirty trick in the book to cheat their way into victories, plus enough new dirty tricks to fill a whole other new book!

A new tone is what I have been recommending to Bernie’s lawyer in Washington D.C., Brad Deutsch, plus court actions to de-certify several phony primaries. About the NY Primary heist, our citizen’s evidence has been turned in, to both the New York Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, and to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara. What they do with it determines the future of the American Democracy.

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[Here’s a joke told to me by a very witty friend in Santa Fe, New Mexico:

“Hillary’s legal baggage is outgrowing her many ordinary suitcases so much that she will have to buy new baggage, and with those speech mega-fees from Goldman Sachs, the ten million dollar gifts to the Clinton Foundation, and the $338,000 George Clooney dinners, she ought to be able to afford vintage Louis Vuitton Steamer Trunks, not just Walmart suitcases, for her legal baggage.”]

Stephen Fox
Santa Fe, New Mexico
New Millennium Fine Art
505 983-2002