This’ll most likely be a short post, because media criticism doesn’t really take up the space that real political criticism does.
Yesterday (3/26/2016), the Sanders campaign won 3/3 states and won by margins totaling (at the very least) twenty percentage points. That is self-evidently newsworthy. Earlier this week, he also won Utah and Idaho by similarly impressive margins. To be honest, in a two-person race, any plus-fifteen percentage point win is worthy of analysis, in my opinion.
Up until this week, the media seemed to agree. When Sanders won YUGE in NH and VT, the extra analysis came quick: Sanders does well in his home state and the neighbor. Even if you find the “neighbor state” narrative faulty, there’s some (bad) analysis there. When Clinton made it to the south, her huge margin victories led to the analysis that Sanders can’t turn out minority votes (again, I’m not here to take issue with the way that the news media has analyzed these events, even if their analysis is just absolute dogshit).
Then we turned West. Utah, Idaho, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii have spoken, and if they’re not actively on fire, they’re certainly feeling some Bern. The margins, like the aforementioned early contests, were YUGE.
And yet, when I turned on MSNBC shortly before giving up on Hawaii returns last night, I was not greeted by shouting brick of cheese, Chris Matthews. Nor was Rachel Maddow’s typical wry excitement over all of the election day wonkery present. Not even their weekend B team.
No, MSNBC was in Lockup, running a scroll with the day’s caucus results across the bottom of the screen. I flipped to CNN, and they were talking to some GOP talking heads about the #TedCruzSexScandal. I turn to Fox News and they’re showing me a commercial about self-lubricating catheters. (I didn’t stick around Fox News. The catheter commercial was inordinately long.)
This morning, with all of the fighting over whether Bernie can win minorities (despite having just won the only state to never have a white majority), and with all the redbaiting emanating from “good liberals,” I just wanted to get in to an ideological scuffle with some depressed liberals. Instead, I’m forced to take a Poynter Panel perspective on what MSNBC, CNN, and (lol, nah) Fox News were doing last night and why it matters.
The extent to which the media shapes and restricts the public ideology has already been analyzed and dissected at length in Leftist circles. If this concept sounds foreign and you want to know, read you some Frankfurt school and some Chomsky. I can’t explain it better than they did.
But mass media, in the age of the internet at least, is beginning to show its age. Literally: the target demos for every cable news network are in their 60’s while the youth largely receive their news through the internet (and experience the epistemically-troubling echo chamber effect therein). This is, perhaps, a bit of specificity that can help to explain the insane splits between Sanders and Clinton when it comes to the age of supporters.
So if you’re reading this, DON’T WORRY! You’re already on the internet. In fact, you may well have said to yourself, “why didn’t you just search “#HICaucus” on Twitter if you wanted to know what was going on?” And I did! I am, however, a glutton for punishment and I love seeing what the clueless liberal commentariat is saying.
The problem, however, are those 60 years olds in the target demographic for cable. This ties back in to the original point of the piece: what’s the danger in a media blackout? The Sanders margins are commonly presented as a story of his success with the youth, but the Yang narrative attached to that Yin story is his commensurate failure with the old.
I almost don’t need to complete the syllogism for you to get it at this point: A) cable news doesn’t cover Sanders in a legitimate way B) the olds get their information from cable news C) olds won’t support Sanders (if they’re even aware of him in more than a holistic sense, at all).
So, yeah. There’s definitely an extent, perhaps measurable, to which the cable news discourse has depressed Sanders’ likely numbers among the olds. That really sucks. I’m pissed, but with every large margin victory by Sanders accompanied with age splits that suggest a wholesale generational shift to the Left, I can’t help but smile. After all, the new Socialist generation will exist longer than MSNBC will.