Race to the White House: The Media vs. Bernie

Bernie Sanders’ recent rise in the Democratic polls to become “a co-frontrunner” with Joe Biden has sparked a change in the mainstream media, notes Conor Lynch at The Week: They’ve gone from “ignoring” Sanders to “treating him like an existential threat.” The New York Times, for example, portrayed the Vermont socialist as “a kind of mirror image of the reactionary president,” while CNN moderators “ganged up on Sanders at the last Democratic debate.” Even “flagship liberal” network MSNBC has been “openly hostile” to Bernie, all of which helps “explain why the majority of Americans don’t trust the media.” Nor is the anti-Sanders campaign done, predicts Lynch. Over the next few months it’ll only “intensify.”

From the right: Trump Towers Over His Rivals

In Iowa, President Trump is “just bigger than his opponents,” cheers the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Not only did he fill up “all 7,152 seats” at Drake University, another 1,000 or so “hung around in sub-freezing temperatures outside.” The event “dwarfed those of any of his Democratic rivals days before the Iowa caucuses.” Trump is “on top of his game,” while the Dems “can’t get it together.” And the president “spent a good deal of his speech reminding the audience of it” — in part, by poking fun at his foes: “Joe [Biden] had a crowd so small the other day that they set up a round table,” snarked Trump. “What happened to Mini Mike?” he asked of Michael Bloomberg. “Mini Mike — I’ve had him up to here,” he said, raising his hand to mid-chest. The crowd “roared.” Trump carried Iowa in 2016, after Barack Obama won it twice. Now, “Trump towers over presidential politics.” And that “is not likely to change by November.”

From the left: What Happened to ‘Safe, Legal and Rare’?

Kirsten Day has been a loyal Democrat “since 1988.” She’s also pro-life — and that, she laments at USA Today, is enough to alienate her from her party. Case in point: At an Iowa town hall this week, she asked presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg if he’d “support more moderate language to include pro-life Democrats,” but he “refused — twice — to even answer” her question. That’s a break from Democrats’ 1996 and 2000 platforms, which called for abortion to be “safe, legal and rare” and for respecting “the individual conscience of each American on this difficult issue.” These days, the party kowtows to “abortion extremists,” driving the more than “17 million Democrats” who “identified as pro-life in 2016” to support Trump in November. Sighs Day: “I want my party back.”

Libertarian: Don Lemon’s Ignorance About Ignorance

CNN host Don Lemon’s laughter at “insults about the intelligence of Trump supporters” only highlights the “ignorant belief that Trump supporters are much dumber than the general public” and “those who supported Clinton in 2016,” Jim Lindgren argues at Reason. In reality, gold-standard social-science surveys show that Trump supporters score “significantly higher” on science and vocabulary questions than “the rest of the public combined,” while Clinton supporters scored “significantly lower.” Nor do the data support the belief that Trump supporters don’t know geography, as Lemon and his panelists suggested. The fact that Lemon laughed “uncontrollably” over false stereotypes only shows that he’s “a bigot”— and, “like most bigots,” an “ignorant one as well.”

Foreign desk: Brexit’s a Win for Democracy

“All looks rosy” in Britain as it exits the European Union, writes Christopher Gage at American Greatness. “No marauding gangs of mottled malcontents seething in the streets. A distinct lack of killer bees, no super-gonorrhea.” Brexit is done, and it proves that “democracy still works.” Britain is leaving the EU “against the counsel of virtually every sinew of power . . . The little people have won.” Voting has “changed history” — it’s “a victory of the ordinary over the elite. The many over the few. And,” he says, “it tastes better now than it did on the morning it first broke.”

—Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Elisha Maldonado