Termed by his supporters as the “Bernie Blackout,” the Bernie Sanders’s media coverage, or lack thereof, during the 2020 primary has turned into somewhat of a wry, running joke. But earlier this week, we got two pieces that both did something rare: took the Sanders campaign seriously.

The first was Ruby Cramer’s profile of Sanders for BuzzFeed. The piece, which follows Sanders on the campaign trail, including during the time in which the senator suffered from a heart attack, gets at the mission of his campaign without understating its inadequacies. As Sanders interviews a woman about the problems she faces in her crumbling mobile home outside of Montgomery, Alabama, Cramer notes that he continuously nudges her to talk to the camera, to “show them, not me.” Cramer puts Sanders’s strategy simply: “His suggestion, by asking you to speak up about your private anxieties, many of them financial, is that you and the millions of people in the proverbial audience will begin to see your struggles not as personal failings, but systemic ones.”

Sanders is old, yes, and unfortunately he’s only going to get…older. After his heart attack, Cramer notes that the senator was bothered about the “relative smallness of it,” that it put the focus on him, not the rest of the country. But, as Cramer points out, “This, like any endeavor in electoral politics, hinges on the will and presence and personality of its leader. The political revolution is no less human or fallible.” Note that the implied question is not the usual “how to pay for it” or “will he bring Republicans into the fold,” but whether or not Sanders can build a movement that will sustain his policy agenda beyond himself.

Bernie Sanders can have a little serious coverage at a December rally in Coachella Valley. David McNew Getty Images

The second piece, by Politico’s David Siders , looked at the shape a Sanders presidency might take in its first 100 days. “The prospect of a Sanders presidency is worth taking seriously,” Siders writes. Interviewing a number of Sanders advisers, Siders puts together a picture of Sanders’s possible cabinet: Bill McKibben as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (or even Secretary of State), Ro Khanna as Secretary of Defense, Zephyr Teachout as Attorney General. It may seem like a fantastical exercise at this point, but it’s a usual one for possible nominees and understanding a potential cabinet and appointees is important information for the public. Knowing if a candidate might put Betsy DeVos and Stephen Miller or Tim Geithner and Rahm Emmanuel in power tells as much about what their presidency would actually do than anything else.

Compare all of this to the coverage that Sanders usually gets. Just last month, The New York Times ran the headline, “One Year From Election, Trump Trails Biden but Leads Warren in Battlegrounds,” omitting Sanders entirely, despite the fact that polling showed he was beating Donald Trump in three battleground states. An analysis of MSNBC’s coverage of the Democratic primary by In These Times found that over two months, Sanders received the least total coverage as well as the most negative (Warren was nearly as undercovered as Sanders, but received the highest proportion of positive mentions). A Politico analysis in November found that Joe Biden got three times the cable media coverage than Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. This is all despite the fact that Sanders has consistently polled near the top of the pack.

Sanders, a staunch democratic socialist for his entire career, and, at times, prickly interviewee, has long battled mainstream media for serious treatment. During the 2016 election, Margaret Sullivan, then-public editor of The New York Times wrote that while the Times had not ignored Sanders’s campaign, “it hasn’t always taken it very seriously. The tone of some stories is regrettably dismissive, even mocking at times.” And more is at stake than just hurt feelings; such treatment comes with material consequences. As Zeeshan Aleem pointed out recently at Vice, the “perception of unelectability has a self-fulfilling nature to it—if journalists think a candidate is far-fetched and dismiss them, then the public is more likely to swing that way as well."



Bernie Sanders can have a little serious coverage, as a treat, while campaigning in New Hampshire. Scott Eisen Getty Images

As far back as the 1980s, when he was then-mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders hosted a public access show to speak directly to regular people about regular issues. To boot, the show subverted traditional media channels that perhaps he intuited might not take him or his politics seriously. In one episode of the show, which closely echoes the scenes in Cramer’s piece, Sanders meets with seniors on Medicare, and asks them to tell him about the gap in coverage when it comes to purchasing prescription drugs. “They go up every time we buy,” one woman says.

Some have posited that this time around , Sanders has benefited from the blackout, given that he’s avoided the pressures and scrutiny normally put upon frontrunners. “Lets face it, the corporate media was never going to anoint Bernie Sanders the nominee,” Ryan Grim, The Intercept’s D.C. bureau chief points out . “Maybe the best he can hope for is that they just stay out of his way.”



It’s very possible that Sanders has benefited from the media’s omissions this time around. Less press is certainly better for the campaign than one that instinctively dismisses the issues he raises—Medicare-for-All, climate change, student debt—out of hand. But the public deserves a more incisive and comprehensive coverage of Sanders’s two campaigns, one that is both critical and complimentary in the ways that matter. One that takes real people’s real problems—and how we might begin to fix them—as seriously as we want our presidential candidates to. This week, we got a taste of what that looks like.

Clio Chang Clio Chang is a freelance writer based in New York.

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