Bernie Sanders Wants To Use New Media To Focus On Inequality

Sanders spoke with me as he prepared for the town hall about his view that new media platforms can, and must, open up new debates.

TCT: You say there are two fundamental issues that you want to see addressed. What’s the first?

SANDERS: The first one is that this country is moving into oligarchy. The three wealthiest people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of American society. The top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. And then, politically, what we have seen since the Citizens United decision (by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2010) is billionaires like the Koch brothers and a few of their friends pouring hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into the political process to elect candidates who represent the wealthy and the powerful. That is an issue of huge consequence to the future of America — in terms of the economic life of this country and the collapse of the middle class, and a political system which is being corrupted by big money and Citizens United.

TCT: And the second issue has to do with how the first is covered?

SANDERS: The second issue deals with the fact that we have a corporate media, which is not as Donald Trump defines it “fake news.” That’s not the issue. It’s not that you have people on CNN, or writing for The New York Times, who are deliberately lying or trying to destroy politicians — that’s not the case. Every day there are very good and important articles that appear in The Washington Post and The New York Times, on CBS News and everywhere else.

The problem is that, to a very significant degree, corporate media ignores, or pays very little attention to, the most important issues facing working people. That is the problem with corporate media today.

If you look at just the issue I described to you — the movement in this country toward oligarchy — you will find very, very little discussion about that. Stormy Daniels will get 10 times more print and video coverage than will the movement toward oligarchy in this country. You will see very little discussion about poverty in this country. “Poverty” is just not a word that is used on television very often.

TCT: And you think you can do something about that (with the livestreamed discussion of inequality).

SANDERS: This is revolutionary in terms of media. What this means is that there is now extraordinary potential to get issues out — whether it is the health care crisis and Medicare for all; whether it is the collapse of the middle class and the movement toward oligarchy; or maybe next time we’ll do something on criminal justice or guns or immigration or whatever it may be. We now have the possibility through livestreaming to discuss serious issues with serious panelists that will never be discussed — or very rarely be discussed — on the corporate media.

TCT: This question of corporate media’s coverage of inequality, or the lack thereof, had been a concern of yours for a long time. But your concern hasn’t just been with the patterns of coverage by traditional media, it has been with the issue that those patterns of coverage create results by putting some issues on the table while taking other issues off.

SANDERS: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, as I’ve said before, the issue is not fake news. I don’t think The New York Times lies every day or is trying to attack me or anybody else. That is not the issue. The issue is just what you talked about.

Somebody has to determine every morning what the news of the day is. And somebody says that we need three days of coverage on some Trump aide getting kicked out of the White House — day after day after day. Do you think people in Kansas or in Vermont or California are sitting up and worrying about that? It’s important. I’m not suggesting that these things should not be covered. But there are other issues that should also be covered.

Today, there will be many, many, many hundreds of people dying in this country because they can’t afford the prescriptions that they need or the health care that they need. That happens every day, and that’s just not a story in our media. There are children today who are sleeping in the back seat of cars because their mom does not have an apartment that she can afford. That happens today, but it’s not a story …

So what I want to do is begin to move forward presenting our perspective on what we think are the most important issues facing America.

TCT: You’ve had a history of using new technology, new technologies, to reframe debates. So this is not a new thing for you.

SANDERS: You’re absolutely right. As you well know, I am somewhat of a technology Luddite. But what I do recognize is that this technology is enormously important and we should utilize every new technology that we can find in order to communicate with the American people about the important issues that are facing them. And it turns out that livestreaming is revolutionary. It means that somebody now can turn on their cellphone and produce something that goes out to many millions of people. So that is the new technology that we intend to take significant advantage of.

John Nichols is associate editor of The Capital Times. jnichols@madison.com and @NicholsUprising. 

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