Jack Shafer is Politico's senior media writer.

Tuesday’s first-of-the-season Democratic debate is unlikely to be what Bernie Sanders thinks it should be: a high-minded and nuanced discussion about the policies and prescriptions that would help Americans. But that’s because the media are running the debate—and the media’s chief goal, he believes, is to create a “nation of morons.” It’s not exactly a new complaint of his. In fact, his complaints about the media predate the birth of most of the reporters who’ll be covering the Las Vegas bout.

Sanders possesses “the consistency of a piston,” as my colleague Michael Kruse recently put it. In his four decades of politicking, Sanders has remained faithful to his original views on labor, Wall Street and the banks, poverty, socialism, education, the environment, women’s rights, income disparities, foreign policy and the woes of the middle class.


Nor have Sanders’ ideas about media—especially what he calls the “corporate media”—wavered since he entered Vermont politics in the 1970s. In his view, the media tend to trivialize the important issues if they cover them at all. They want to cover campaign fights, not campaign debates. They over-rely on entertaining soundbites. Their news agenda is about generating profits, not producing quality journalism that will “educate” the voters. And as powerful as the corporate media are, they seek even more concentrated power through acquisition and consolidation.

Politicians have been tying the press to the whipping post for centuries, so Sanders hasn’t discovered anything new. In this campaign cycle, hardly a day goes by without Donald Trump calling reporters “clowns” or “dishonest,” sometimes singling out by name those he considers the worst offenders. Hillary Clinton's disdain for the “scorps” in the press is legendary. When not playing duck and run, she marginalizes press inquiries with dismissive or evasive answers or by calling the questions “distractions.” But no presidential contender in memory has confronted the media quite the way Sanders has—and no candidate’s media criticism is as central to his or her core beliefs as Sanders’ complaints. He calls into question not only the product but also the capitalist structure upon which Big Media subsists.

Sanders never shrinks from speaking what he considers to be truth to media power. During an August campaign swing through Iowa, Sanders once again confronted reporters over the content of his questions, coming across as a press critic.

“The corporate media talks about all kinds of issues except the more important issues,” Sanders said, hitting the trivialization check-box. “And time after time, I’m being asked to criticize Hillary Clinton. That’s the sport that you guys like,” he continued.

As one press critic to another, I can inform Sanders that asking a politician to criticize another politician’s views or actions is not necessarily “sport.” The conflict he seeks to avoid helps voters decide which candidate better represents their views and interests. But I know Sanders is too dug in on this point to ever surrender. The public, he continued in his hallway reprimand, had tired of “gotcha questions” from the press and the effort of reporters to “make conflict between the candidates rather than talking about the real issues impacting the American people.” And with this flourish, he filled the confrontation and entertainment check-boxes to overflowing.

The media have never been Sanders’ highest priority—they don't, for instance, rate a mention on his Bernie for president issue page. But the topic has never been far from his lips at any time during his career. Sometimes he criticizes the press, as in the Iowa example, to fend off questions he thinks are beneath him, that don’t advance his campaign or that he regards as too personal. In a perfectly Sandersian world, he’d be allowed to both ask and answer all the questions. Other times, the Sanders media critique verges into Noam Chomsky territory, denouncing the press for adhering to its corporatist agenda.

Sanders expressed his early views—largely unchanged to this day—on media in a 1979 piece for Vermont’s Vanguard Press, “Social Control and the Tube.” The goal of the corporate TV masters was to “intentionally brainwash people into submission and helplessness,” making them easier marks for salesmen of “underarm spray deodorants, automobiles, beer, cat food, politicians or whatever.” (The deodorant menace is a recurrent Sanders theme, too.) Sanders continued:

"With considerable forethought [TV capitalists] are attempting to create a nation of morons who will faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate, and faithfully work for their employers for as low a wage as possible."

Asserting that the “controllers of that medium have far more power than almost any politician,” Sanders called for a “democratically owned and controlled” TV system populated with “dozens of channels of commercial-free” broadcasting to replace the existing order. I’m sure that Sanders finds little consolation in the fact that half of his wish came true: Dozens of commercial-free channels such as the Disney Channel, HDNET, porn channels, the various flavors of HBO, Starz and Showtime and more have been established since his Vanguard Press manifesto. While commercial-free, the channels are still corporately owned.

A politician can ignore the press, co-opt it, take the lumps as they’re distributed, or —as many conservative politicians do—fight it like a punching bag to their advantage. Following the conservative example, Sanders fought the press for all these decades, and it has done much to burnish his image as a rebel and an independent. In every one of his political campaigns—from his hopeless third-party candidacies in the 1970s through his current run for president—Sanders has cast himself as David fighting the Goliaths of the major parties. He extends this underdog persona by relating to the media as if they were another Goliath, making it easier for him to deflect the press corps’ criticisms as unfair corporate manipulation.

But whereas Clinton or Trump might parry with the press for sport (as Trump, in fact, did Thursday night, devoting much of his speech in Las Vegas to media complaints), the Sanders press critique doesn’t stand separate from his critique of capitalism: In fact, his complaints about the media are part of the central animating principle of his entire political career. “We live in a nation in which a handful of very, very wealthy people have extraordinary power over our economy and our political life and the media,” he said in an August speech, reducing the corporate media to a mouthpiece for the rich. And we know how he feels about the rich.

Generally, reporters don’t mind unflattering scrutiny of their work, especially if the unflattering scrutiny helps generate good copy, which in the Sanders case it does. He did plenty of wrasslin’ with the press in the 1980s, after winning his first term as the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. The object of his disaffections then was the local newspaper, the Burlington Free Press, which was and is still owned by the Gannett corporate chain. I imagine Sanders would have traded punches with the Free Press had it been owned by a local family or a regional chain, but the fact that the paper was owned by a corporate chain made it an extra-rich target for him. During his run for a third term as mayor, he accused the Free Press’ editorial page of having “personal hatred” for him.

“Their editorials have been totally negative, totally distorted,” he told the Associated Press in a piece titled “America’s Only Socialist Mayor Continues Feuding With Newspaper." “I think there is great fear of us,” Sanders added. That a Gannett paper would have “great fear” for a local mayor, socialist or Satanist, is, of course, laughable. But the hectoring worked to Sanders’ advantage by making him look like the people’s hero—at least in the eyes of the impressionable.

Later that year, Sanders took the local CBS TV affiliate, WCAX, to task during a media panel in which Vermont politicians got to turn the tables on reporters and grill them in front of the video cameras. Sanders’ most sustained beef was against the local TV station’s propensity to call Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega a “Marxist” or even a “Communist” in its broadcasts. Ortega was neither, Sanders insisted, and using those labels just played into the Reagan administration’s agenda.

“Why don’t we use the phrase ‘Daniel Ortega, democratically elected president of Nicaragua’“? Sanders wanted to know.

At a 1988 Vermont forum, he gave a more detailed presentation of his press critique in which he explained that the function of the private media was to make money for the people who own it.

“The media itself, is as important a political issue as exists. Candidates running for governor of the state of Vermont should be talking about, ‘What is Channel 3 doing?’ ‘What is Channel 5 doing?’”

Like others on the left, Sanders was fretting about the growing conglomeratization of the media. Citing takeover experts, he said it was possible that 10 international corporations could control most media—newspapers, magazines, television, etc.—by the mid-1990s.

“We do have a free media. A free society. And for a mere $6 [billion] or $7 billion, anybody in the room could probably buy CBS tomorrow. You might want to pass the hat; after putting the money in my [mayoral] campaign what we have left over we might want to buy NBC,” Sanders said to laughs and cheers.

“I’m not sympathetic to government control of the media,” he told the crowd, but added that, “corporate control of the media is equally dangerous.”

Sanders’ prediction of a highly conglomerated media world has not held up. Yes, Comcast has gotten fatter by purchasing NBCUniversal from GE and Sinclair Broadcasting continues to add television stations to its already gigantic bundle, but in recent years, a stronger countertrend toward de-conglomeratization has expressed itself. The New York Times Co. has sold off its regional newspapers, its television division, and the Boston Globe, which it acquired in the early 1990s. The Washington Post Co. has sold off its flagship newspaper, its smaller newspapers, and Newsweek. The Knight Ridder newspaper chain fell apart. The Tribune Company, E.W. Scripps, Belo Corp. and TEGNA, the media conglomerate formerly known as Gannett, have similarly diced themselves into small companies, as has Rupert Murdoch’s international conglomerate. Viacom (CBS, Paramount, MTV, Nickelodeon, etc.) likewise split itself into two separately operated companies in 2005 when it discovered that conglomeratization delivered little synergy. The AOL purchase of Time Inc., which created the conglomerate of conglomerates, continues to spin apart, as the cable division, the music division, the print division and AOL itself found new corporate homes. Meanwhile, Wall Street voices keep telling the Disney conglomerate to unload ABC because it's been a “drag on Disney’s stock for years.” Conglomerates are hard businesses to run well, as Columbia University professor Bruce Greenwald told the New York Times in 2005.

“The media is giving up to a large degree any pretense at serious journalism, and you’re moving into the trend of the USA Today—simple, and stupid, and color pictures,” Sanders said at the 1988 media forum. His sweeping dismissal was simple and stupid—even for a press critic—and continues to be wrong. Everywhere you look on the media horizon today you find a proliferation of long-form work of distinguished complexity and brilliance, much of it done by companies, startups and nonprofits that didn’t exist at the time of Sanders' original complaint.

Like other politicians, Sanders has always faulted journalists for asking the questions they’re interested in instead of the questions he’s interested in answering (questions about the rich-poor divide, for example). At the 1988 forum, he complained that he’d spend four hours writing a speech, 15 minutes giving it and then enduring press questions on other topics. Press behavior, he cautioned, was producing “politicians who think in 30-second tidbits, which leads you to Ronald Reagan and photo opportunities.”

In 1988, Sanders scored minor revenge on the local press with a stunt he describes in in his 1997 political memoir, Outsider in the House. While running for the U.S. House of Representatives as an independent, he called a news conference “about agricultural issues,” as he writes. The local Associated Press bureau snubbed the invitation, “which was getting to be a habit with them.” As Sanders’ luck would have it, a 60 Minutes film crew was tailing his campaign, giving him the opportunity to counterattack.

“When you’re a politician dealing with the media, life is difficult. If you’re getting screwed by the media, you don’t have much recourse. Who can you complain to? They own the camera. They print the news. What are you going to do about it?” he wrote.

This time, Sanders instructed his staff and the 60 Minutes crew to follow him to the AP office, where he got to ask the questions.

“OK, how come you never cover my press conferences?” he asked the AP staffers. “You have time for the Republicans. You have time for the Democrats. Why not an independent?”

It’s a wonderful story—and it’s certainly true—but its reward to Sanders was limited. After Sanders lost that race, the 60 Minutes segment never ran.

“It was delicious,” he wrote. “I had a lot of fun that afternoon. Of course, I paid for it later. You never beat the media. After I was elected in 1990, the AP chief went to Washington to do a long series on whether or not I was an effective congressman. Guess what he concluded?”

The AP piece to which Sanders refers did portray him as an ineffective congressman. But its writer, Christopher Graff, wasn’t delivering payback. Sanders had marginalized himself by categorizing himself as an independent in a legislative body in which everybody else was a Democrat or a Republican. Democratic House veterans such as Barney Frank, Bill Richardson and Joe Moakley gave Graff stinging anti-Sanders quotations. “He screams and hollers, but he is all alone,” said Moakley. (Disclosure: Graff is my editor’s father; I’ve never met or talked to him.)

The Sanders idea that “You never beat the media” restates the David and Goliath myth that the candidate has exploited so skillfully for so long. At the time Sanders wrote this passage, he had already won four consecutive terms as mayor and several terms in Congress. If anything, the Sanders record shows that even a Vermont socialist can “beat” the media if he runs long enough and keeps to his script.

In recent years, Sanders has been less voluble on the subject of the media. His views haven’t changed, he just hasn’t spent that much time—or attracted that much notice—on criticizing the press, but when he does, it’s still to take offense at how the rich are exploiting the press.

For Sanders, it’s not just about the big international corporations owned by the Rupert Murdochs of the world: In fact, Sanders complained about the corporatizaton of the alternative press in 2009 as he announced why he was launching his own online show, Senator Sanders Unfiltered, writing, “Even the alternative weekly newspapers, traditionally a bastion of progressive thought and analysis, have been bought by a monopoly franchise and made a predictable shift to the right in their coverage of local news.” (But even among alt weeklies, Sanders’ fears haven’t entirely been borne out—his home-state’s paper, Seven Days, now offers the state’s best political coverage as his much-hated Burlington Free Press has withered under Gannett’s ownership.)

Another foray in 2012 continued his long-standing battle against the conglomerate boogeyman, a fight that has consumed him on the Hill for more than a decade. In a 2012 POLITICO piece he co-authored with former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, Sanders reiterated his opposition to a new rule that would allow a single corporation to own a major newspaper and multiple TV and radio stations (as well as Internet service) in the top 20 media markets. By denying struggling newspapers the opportunity to purchase TV stations in their markets, Sanders may be dooming them to early deaths.

Today, out on the hustings as he faces Clinton in the presidential primaries, Sanders continues to pour his press lectures into reporters’ notebooks. In midsummer, the Huffington Post collected several examples of Sanders denouncing coverage of campaign fundraising, polling, gaffes and trivia: After Sen. Marco Rubio accidentally struck a kid in the face with a football, Sanders cluck-clucked that the incident “will get more coverage than Marco Rubio’s position on Social Security.” He tweeted about the “corporate media” diverting attention from the important issues. ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl got the thanks-for-the-question-but-no-comment treatment after asking him if Clinton is “honest and trustworthy.” In August, when Ana Marie Cox of the New York Times asked him about Clinton’s hair, he drew on four decades of experience in chastising the press to put her in her place.

“OK, Ana, I don’t mean to be rude here. I am running for president of the United States on serious issues, OK? Do you have serious questions?” he said.

Historically, the Sanders press critique has disparaged corporate control and reportorial priorities, but only rarely does his grouching light directly on the way the press reports on him.

“I don’t have a problem with the way I’m covered,” he said in August. “Do I think I’m being covered any worse or any better than other candidates? No. Has anyone ever heard me say that? ‘Gee, you’re being unfair to me.’ I never said that. But this is what I will say. I want you to talk about and force discussion about climate change. Do you think you do that enough? I would like you to force discussion on poverty in America.”

******

More Bernie deodorant news: In the 1979 liner notes to his Folkways CD, Eugene V. Debs: Trade Unionist, Socialist, Revolutionary 1855-1926, he disparaged his fellow citizens for having heard so much “about dozens of different kinds of underarm spray deodorants” but so little about Debs. What brand do you pack for your ‘pits? Let me know via email to [email protected]. My email alerts use Mitchum, my Twitter feed uses Secret. My RSS feed, which paints itself with Tom’s, is currently in sick bay and not alerting readers to new stories.