Sanders shrugs off weekend newspaper endorsements of rival Clinton

Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday shrugged off endorsements of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination by newspapers in two early voting states, characterizing the papers as the "media establishment.”

“We are taking on the entire establishment. We are taking on the economic establishment. We’re taking on the political establishment. And, [with] all due respect, we are taking on the media establishment,” the Vermont senator said on ABC’s "This Week." “I expect that Secretary Clinton will get a lot of the endorsements from mainstream media, but I have the endorsement, and I’m very proud to say, of 2.5 million individual contributions to my campaign.”


Over the weekend, both The Des Moines Register, in the first caucus state of Iowa, and the Concord Monitor, in the first primary state of New Hampshire, endorsed Clinton.

Sanders also played up his viability as not only a competitive candidate outside of Iowa and New Hampshire, where he currently polls higher than Clinton, but also as a candidate in this fall's general election.

In "virtually all of the national polls that have been done, which have Bernie Sanders running against Trump, Hillary Clinton running against Trump,” Sanders said in response to recent attacks against his electability in a general election, "we run significantly better than does Hillary Clinton. We’re beating them by a wider margin.”

Addressing new reports that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg could seek the presidency as a third-party candidate, Sanders called it another sign “this country is moving away from democracy to oligarchy.”

“It would be very interesting if Donald Trump became the Republican candidate, who’s a multibillionaire, and Michael Bloomberg became an independent candidate, who is a multibillionaire,” Sanders said.