As Democratic campaigns for 2020 begin to shift into high gear, the MSM has been hard at work chipping away at popular liberal candidates who clearly aren't the chosen one to go up against President Trump.

Both CNN and MSNBC have gone after Bernie Sanders of late, while the Washington Post recently brought up a "crime lab scandal" under Kamala Harris' watch as San Francisco DA more than a decade ago.

That said, nobody on the left has drawn more negative coverage from the MSM as former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz - who made a late-January announcement that he will probably run for President in 2020 as an independent, a move widely predicted to split Democrats and ensure that Trump wins another term.

Schultz has been subject to a spate of negative press coverage, including five negative CNN articles in a single day.

Enter the Daily Beast hit-squad

Schultz sat down with NBC's Dylan Byers on Saturday at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference - which, according to the Daily Beast's Matt Wilstein, was a disaster.

Wilstein's article, titled "Howard Schultz Bombs at SXSW" suggests that the audience went from "polite chuckles" to groaning at Schultz, who "rose from his chair to attempt to inject some energy into the lackluster event, but it barely helped." The rest of the article is essentially Wilstein's critique of what he doesn't like about Schultz.

Except that's not what happened

Schultz received positive feedback from the audience throughout his appearance - including being interrupted with applause when he said that growing Starbucks was about the "fragile balance between a fiduciary responsibility and the humanity of our organization."

After watching the interview, it appears that the Daily Beast's Matt Wilstein set out to write a hit-piece against perhaps the biggest threat to the DNC in 2020:

Responding to the Daily Beast was a very pissed off Erin McPike - Schultz's Spokeswoman, who shot off an angry response to Wilstein's hit-piece that the Beast added to the bottom of the article.

"We must not have been attending the same thing," wrote McPike. "I see you came to it to drive an agenda. Did you not notice those at the end who gave Howard a standing ovation?"

"Did you not notice the multiple times he was interrupted by applause?"

"Did you not notice the people who cheered when he asked all the entrepreneurs in the room if they had been told they couldn’t achieve their dreams, and then he said keep going?"

You seemed to have completely misinterpreted the response from the crowd about socialism. It wasn’t that they didn’t agree with him. They were groaning about the idea of socialism. If you had any read of the crowd whatsoever, you would have noticed that. And, by the way, he has been defining capitalism at events over the last 24 hours. It is not as if he doesn’t have an answer. I’m not sure you have an understanding of the people who would come to see Howard at SXSW. It troubles me that you might not be doing your homework if you couldn’t actually talk to people in the crowd. The unicorn thing was a joke. And he took it as such. The dialogue was fun, the rapport good, the interaction with the crowd strong. When I was a reporter, I never confused fiction with reality. But it seems you came with a piece in mind. Bombs? Come on. -Erin McPike

SXSW host Dylan Byers also refuted the Daily Beast's take on Schultz's appearance, tweeting: "Respectfully, this @mattwilstein report offers a very inaccurate portrayal of how audiences responded to @HowardSchultz this morning. It was largely, in fact surprisingly, positive ... also check the post game scrum"