There’s little love for Bernie Sanders on the television news circuit. After his landslide win in Saturday’s Nevada caucuses, MSNBC host Chris Matthews compared the victory to Nazi Germany’s successful invasion of France in 1940. Also on MSNBC, James Carville, who ran Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, deemed it a big win for Vladimir Putin. On CBS, former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel fretted that Democrats were making a suicidal choice in going for Sanders. Donna Brazile, the former Democratic National Committee chair turned Fox News contributor, and Joe Lockhart, the former Clinton administration press secretary and current CNN contributor, were irked by a Sanders tweet that read: “I’ve got news for the Republican establishment. I’ve got news for the Democratic establishment. They can’t stop us.”

If you have watched television over the past several weeks, you will have seen something resembling the seven stages of grief unfold. There has been shock and denial, anger and bargaining, as pundits have attempted to come to grips with Sanders’s rise. And, finally, we have seen acceptance, even though Sanders and his campaign continue to thumb their noses at television news—particularly cable news.



This was a risky decision, but it was necessitated by the coverage that the campaign was receiving on cable television. Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, acknowledged that unflattering coverage on MSNBC, the supposed liberal network, had “actively damaged” the campaign. “The constant diminishment of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC hurts his case for electability,” he said, particularly with its audience of older loyal Democratic voters.



And yet, heading into Super Tuesday, there are signs that the Sanders campaign’s strategy is paying off. Not only is Sanders the clear front-runner, but cable news coverage is shifting. Matthews apologized for his remarks on Monday, amid calls for his firing. Networks are hiring more pro-Sanders pundits to appear on their roundtables. And, bowing to its critics, MSNBC is reportedly reconsidering its entire approach to 2020 coverage.



The Sanders campaign has accomplished this not only by placing concerted pressure on news outlets but also by bypassing traditional outlets and building its own media infrastructure.

