In a column published by numerous outlets, including Common Dreams (1/27/16), Huffington Post (1/27/16), Consortium News (1/27/16), CounterPunch (1/28/16) and Moyers.com (1/28/16), FAIR associate Norman Solomon offered FAIR’s Jim Naureckas as a rebuttal to the “escalating media assault” on Bernie Sanders:
A strong critique of such commentaries has come from the media watch group FAIR, where Jim Naureckas pointed out that “voters would not be asked to vote for ‘a socialist’—they’d be asked to vote for Bernie Sanders. And while pollsters don’t include Sanders in general election matchups as often as they do Hillary Clinton, they have asked how the Vermont senator would do against various Republicans—and he generally does pretty well. In particular, against the candidate the Tribune says is ‘best positioned’ to ‘capture the broad, sensible center’—Jeb Bush—Sanders leads in polls by an average of 3.0 percentage points, based on polling analysis by the website Real Clear Politics.”
In mass media, the conventional sensibilities of pundits like Brooks and Krugman, reporters like Liasson, and outlets like the Chicago Tribune routinely get the first and last words. Here, the last ones are from Naureckas:
“When pollsters match Sanders against the four top-polling Republican hopefuls, on average he does better than Clinton does against each of them—even though she, like Bush, is supposed to be ‘best positioned’ to ‘capture the broad, sensible center,’ according to the Tribune.
“Actually, the elements of Sanders’ platform that elite media are most likely to associate with ‘socialism’—things like universal, publicly funded healthcare and eliminating tuition at public colleges— are quite popular with the public, and go a long way to explain his favorable poll numbers. But they are also the sort of proposals that make Sanders unacceptable to the nation’s wealthy elite—and to establishment media outlets.”
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.