With their frustration reaching a boiling point, supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ bid for the White House recently took to the streets outside the CNN building in Hollywood.
Approximately 1,000 protesters, many holding signs with messages such as “Stop the media blackout” and “CNN: Clinton’s News Network,” rallied to fight an apparent media bias. These protestors felt that this bias was hindering their candidate’s ability to win the Democratic nomination.
The protest comes on the heels of an impressive string of primary victories for the self-labeled democratic-socialist senator, with Wyoming marking seven in a row. A seemingly meager media response to these recent wins has further fueled allegations of a pro-Clinton bias.
While the protesters succeeded in getting both the #OccupyCNN and #BernieBlackout hashtags trending on Twitter, the protest itself failed to garner the attention they were seeking. With the exception of liberal alternative news outlets such as “The Young Turks” and “Salon,” the event was all but ignored.
CNN did not address the protests and continued with their scheduled programming.
The network is owned by Time Warner Inc., a corporation that has been very active in regard to political contributions. According to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan and independent watchdog, Time Warner Inc.’s contributions to Sec. Clinton total $603,170. At first glance, these sort of numbers can certainly be worrisome when thinking about a conflict of interest. But, experts are considerably less concerned with those donations.
Dr. Stephen Caliendo is a professor of political science at North Central College and also serves as the CBS-2 Chicago political analyst. He says such contributions are common and they have a different agenda than attempting to assist politicians’ campaigns.
“Time Warner is giving to lots of candidates — Democrats and Republicans,” Dr. Caliendo pointed out. “They’re advocating their interests through lobbying and donations. I think they’d be giving money to Bernie Sanders if he accepted money from corporations.”
Dr. Caliendo also dispelled the idea of CNN rooting for Clinton: “I can’t imagine the news directors, anchors, and reporters are all thinking it would be better for CNN if she won because she owes us. It’s difficult to convince me that Anderson Cooper is giving Hilary an easier time for his job security.”
The issue of how much coverage the television media is giving to candidates was tackled by Decision Data, a non-partisan number-crunching organization. They analyzed the number of mentions candidates received from top television networks and compared that with the amount of Google searches candidates received. In doing so, their findings seemed to confirm the presence of a bias.
Between June and January, Sanders received 29,525 television mentions to Clinton’s 87,737; yet Sanders has actually received a significantly higher amount of Google searches: 21,536,032 versus Clinton’s 9,235,231. If the media mentions were proportionate to Google searches, Sanders would have been featured in 61,500 additional stories, which would bring his total to 91,094, nearly five thousand more than Clinton.
However, Caliendo was skeptical of Decision Data’s findings.
“Part of that is Hilary Clinton is a known entity,” Dr. Caliendo said. “People already know her because she’s been in the spotlight for a long time.”
Sanders, on the other hand, simply doesn’t enjoy that same name recognition.
“Even though he’s been around for a long time, as a member of Congress he’s one of 435 members,” said Caliendo. “He’s from a small state, and he wasn’t in leadership and before this run for president he wasn’t attention-seeking.”
In short, Clinton doesn’t need as many Google searches as Sanders. Clinton has been a well-known political figure since her time as First Lady, if not earlier. Many, however, had not heard of Sanders prior to his bid for the White House and therefore more people are seeking information on him.
In addition to the discrepancy in its coverage, Sanders supporters also criticize the media for their constant coverage of businessman and television personality Donald Trump, with many saying they aided in his political rise.
Trump entered the Republican race 10 months ago with a speech in which he infamously declared: “When Mexico sends their people, they’re not sending their best…they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump has led the race nearly continuously since then.
In the months following that statement Trump continued on in a similar fashion. His fellow candidates, lured by the level of attention he received in such a fiercely contended race, attempted to follow suit.
The usually innocent quarreling between candidates also turned more obscene as the race went on. This culminated with Sen. Marco Rubio raising questions about Trumps manhood, leading CNN to publish an article titled, “Donald Trump Defends Size of His Penis.”
Dr. Caliendo believes in this case Sanders supporters’ charges of media wrongdoing are more warranted.
“That was his plan; he’s a media person. He knows how to get free media attention, he’s done it for his businesses, and he’s done it for his television show,” Caliendo said. “I think the media folks got wrapped up in the novelty of it. It was a stunt, it was good fun.”
While the media was quick to write him off, his messages resonated with a significant number of voters. Now, Dr. Caliendo says, Trump has the media working very well to his advantage.
“The story has become the perceived inevitability of his candidacy, but that just fuels more attention and now they can’t stop talking about him. And that’s what he wants. He couldn’t have bought this kind of media attention, he can only manufacture that through charisma and activities and interest,” said Caliendo.
Yet Dr. Caliendo spots something of a silver lining in all this.
“We have to assume some responsibility of being attracted to stories that are salacious and therefore driving that coverage,” he said.
In short, the media can certainly attempt to set the agenda when it comes to deciding what issues are going to be covered. But for profit-driven entities, media corporations only have so much freedom to do so since people won’t pay attention to stories that don’t relate to or interest them.
The media has, undeniably, given Trump a significant amount of attention. Returning to the findings of Decision Data, Trump received 183,903 media mentions, nearly 100,000 more than Clinton’s 87,737. In fairness, however, Trump did receive more than 37 million Google searches.
At the end of the day, Trump knows how to get people — and the media alike — talking about him.
