The Bernie Sanders campaign and certainalternative media sources have said that themainstream media in the United States is biased againstBernie Sanders; other sources have said that coverage has not been biased. Allegations of bias primarily concern both his2016 and2020 presidential campaigns, and often revolve around corporate ownership of news organizations, misleading graphics, and a perceived lack of coverage ofBernie Sanders.

Studies of media coverage have shown that the amount of coverage of Sanders during the 2016 election was largely consistent with his polling performance, except during 2015 when Sanders received coverage that exceeded his standing in the polls. Analysis of the language used also concluded that media coverage of Sanders was more favorable than that of any other candidate, whereas his main opponent in the democratic primary, Hillary Clinton, received the most negative coverage. All 2016 candidates received vastly less media coverage than Donald Trump, and the Democratic primary received substantially less coverage than the Republican primary.

There were renewed allegations of media bias against Sanders during the 2020 Democratic primary. Sanders suggested that theWashington Post was not covering him fairly because of the influence ofThe Post's owner Jeff Bezos.^[1][2] These allegations of bias were disputed by the executive editor of thePost, who said they were conspiratorial.^[3] Analyses byNortheastern University's School of Journalism found that Sanders initially received the most positive coverage of any major candidate in the primary and later the third and then fourth most favorable of eight candidates.^[4][5]

Sanders is a self-styleddemocratic socialist^[6] and the longest servingindependent in U.S. congressional history, having avoided party affiliation^[7] throughout his political career. In the U.S.two party system, Sanders is ideologically closer to theDemocratic Party,^[7] which considers itself primarily ranging from centrist to liberal and evenprogressive, depending on regional political landscape. While serving in the Congress, Sanders hascaucused with the Democrats,^[7] which has made him eligible for participation incongressional committees as if he were a member of the Democratic Party. In addition, Sanders received support from Democratic party organizations in Vermont^[7] as well as from theVermont Progressive Party, which also endorses some Democratic candidates in the state.

In November 2015,David Brock, the founder ofAmerican Bridge 21st Century,Media Matters, andCorrect the Record, set up a Delaware company to buyBlue Nation Review and turn it into a vehicle for the Clinton campaign. According toLloyd Grove, the blog was "a comfortable venue for negative Sanders stories that Brock wasn’t successful in placing with mainstream news outlets likeThe New York Times andThe Washington Post".^[8] In 2017, Brock apologized to Bernie Sanders for his aggressive support of Clinton during the 2016 campaign,^[9][10] In the same month, he made a pitch for donors promising to "weaponize information" against Donald Trump, which led to further coverage of Brock's negative campaigning against Sanders during the 2016 primary.^[11]

A 2018 book co-written by three political scientists said that the amount of news coverage Sanders received exceeded his share in the national polls at that time. Throughout the campaign as a whole, their analysis showed that his "media coverage and polling numbers were strongly correlated."^[12]

In her 2018 book, Rachel Bitecofer writes that even though the democratic primary was effectively over in terms of delegate count by mid-March 2016, the media promoted the narrative that the contest between Sanders and Clinton was heating up.^[13] Both Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias ofVox made the same point in the days after Sanders won the Wisconsin primary, arguing that the media was biased in favor of Sanders because it had a vested commercial interest in exaggerating how close the race was in the weeks prior to the NY primary.^[14][15] Bitecofer found that Trump received more media coverage than Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders combined during a time when those were the only primary candidates left in the race.^[13]

A June 2016 report by the Harvard Kennedy SchoolShorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy analyzed the media coverage of candidates in the 2016 presidential primaries.^[16] The report found Trump received more coverage than any other candidate, with the Democratic race getting "less than half the coverage of the Republican race." Regarding Sanders, the analysis found that his campaign was "largely ignored in the early months" of the campaign. At the start of 2015, he was polling similarly to "other lagging Democratic contenders," Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb, while by the summer, "Sanders had emerged as Clinton’s leading competitor but, even then, his coverage lagged." His coverage started to pick up around the pre-primary debates, "though not at a rate close to what he needed to compensate for the early part of the year." Once he did begin to get coverage, it was "overwhelmingly positive in tone": Sanders had the most positive coverage in 2015 of any candidate and Clinton had the least: "in 11 of the 12 months, her "bad news" outpaced her "good news, usually by a wide margin[.]"^[16][17] From March 15 – May 3, the Clinton/Sanders media coverage split was 61:39. For the first time in the campaign, Clinton's press was positive (51:49) and Sanders' press was negative (46:54).^[18]

In her book, Colleen Elizabeth Kelly cited the Shorenstein Center report to say that Sanders and Clinton got a share of news coverage similar to their eventual primary results, until Clinton pulled ahead in the primary. Kelly writes that Sanders was both right and wrong to complain about media bias. Right, because the media was too little interested in the Democratic primary to give him the coverage he needed early, and wrong, because, on average, Sanders's coverage, though initially scant, was more often positive than any other candidate's coverage prior to voting.^[19]

John Sides found that the volume of media coverage of Sanders was consistent with his polling and that the press he was getting was more favorable than Clinton's.^[20] Jonathan Stray, a computational journalism researcher at the Columbia Journalism School, wrote forNieman Lab in January 2016 that, "at least online", Sanders got coverage proportionate to his standing in polls.^[21]

In 2015, Elizabeth Jensen of NPR responded to an influx of emails regarding a "Morning Edition" segment. Jensen said that she does not "find that NPR has been slighting his campaign. In the last two days alone, NPR has covered the Democrats' climate change stances and reactions to the Republican debate and Sanders has been well in the mix."^[22] NPR's media correspondent David Folkenflik responded to criticisms of bias against Sanders in April 2016 saying that Sanders had appeared three times on NPR whereas Clinton had only done so once, that media outlets saw a Sanders win as a "long shot" early in the campaign, and that by April 2016, she appeared very likely to win the nomination.^[23]

In September 2015,Margaret Sullivan, public editor of theNew York Times, wrote that she had received many complaints from readers about purported bias against Sanders. She responded that theTimes had given roughly the same amount of articles dedicated to Sanders as they did to similarly-polling Republican candidates (barring Donald Trump), while conceding that some of the articles written were "fluff" and "regrettably dismissive".^[24] Later in the month, as the campaign gained some steam,The Washington Post wrote, "Sanders has not faced the kind of media scrutiny, let alone attacks from opponents, that leading candidates eventually experience."^[25]

In October 2015, Story Hinckley of theThe Christian Science Monitor said there was "near-blackout from major TV news sources" about the Sanders campaign, despite Sanders polling high and bringing in significant donations.^[26]Media Matters reported on a September 2015 study by Andrew Tyndall, which showedABC,CBS, andNBC devoted 504 minutes to the presidential race (338 to Republicans, 128 minutes to Democrats, of which 8 minutes were about Sanders).^[27] Pointing to online polls contradicting media pundits assessment of the October debate, Bernie Sanders supporters complained of media bias without assessing the unreliability of online polling.^[28]

In January 2016, Claire Malone fromFiveThirtyEight said that Sanders was not the subject of a "media blackout," as he had just reached a 30% share of coverage.^[29]Glenn Greenwald predicted in the same month that "the political and media establishment" would become increasingly hostile towards Sanders as the chances of him winning the Democratic primary increased.^[30]

On March 8, the day of theMichigan primary, in an article published byFAIR, Adam Johnson documented that theWashington Post ran 16 stories about Bernie Sanders over a 16-hour period between a "crucial" debate and primary, all of which were allegedly presented "in a negative light, mainly by advancing the narrative that he was a clueless white man incapable of winning over people of color or speaking to women."^[31][32] TheWashington Post's Callum Borchers responded, saying that all the stories with the exception of two were commentary and analysis pieces. Of the two news articles, one was an Associated Press wire story, and the other was about the Sanders campaign's struggle to connect with African-American primary voters in 2016 and its implications for 2020.^[33] After the Michigan primary had passed, Borchers said thatThe Washington Post ran 16 stories which presented Sanders in a positive light.^[34] Johnson replied by mocking the idea of theWashington Post investigating itself for bias.^[35]

TheNew York Times was criticized for retroactively making significant changes to a March 15, 2016 article about Bernie Sanders' legislative accomplishments over the past 25 years.^[36][37] In addition to the revised title, several negative paragraphs were added.^[38] In 2019, Margaret Sullivan, public editor at theNY Times, wrote that the changes were clear examples of "stealth editing" and that "the changes to this story were so substantive that a reader who saw the piece when it first went up might come away with a very different sense of Sanders' legislative accomplishments than one who saw it hours later."^[39]

After Sanders' win in theWisconsin primary in early April, Ezra Klein wrote, inVox, that the press was interested in making the race seem closer (more exciting) than it actually was.^[15] Leading into the April 19 New York primary,Juan Gonzalez, at the time a senior columnist atNY Daily News, reported that members of the paper's editorial board "were surprised by the furor" surrounding their interview of Bernie Sanders, which Gonzalez said was "largely fueled by the Clinton campaign and their surrogates."^[40]Democracy Now! co-hostAmy Goodman reviewed some of that negative press just prior to the last debate between the two candidates.^[41]

Sanders found support early fromThe Young Turks, which in turn grew rapidly due to its popularity among Sanders supporters.^[42]

According to a March 2019 analysis byNortheastern University's School of Journalism, Sanders received the most positive coverage of any major candidate in the 2020 Democratic primary. An updated analysis in April placed him third out of eight candidates;^[4] a further update for June–September 2019 found that Sanders's positive coverage ranked fourth out of eight major candidates.^[5]In April 2019, Sanders wrote to the board of theCenter for American Progress in response to a video produced by their former media outletThinkProgress. The video mocked him for becoming a millionaire after writing a book about his 2016 election run.^[43][44]

In February 2019, Shane Ryan (Paste Magazine) reported that within 48 hours of Sanders' campaign launch, theWashington Post had published four opinion pieces about him, two of which were by columnistJennifer Rubin. Ryan described the common themes in these columns as a "manufactured narrative" that Sanders' time had—as one of the columnists put it—"come and gone".^[45] One week later, Paul Heintz opined in the Post that "the way the senator sees it, the job of a journalist is merely to transcribe his diatribes unchallenged and broadcast his sermons unfiltered".^[46]

In June 2019, Katie Halper, writing for FAIR, reported that Sydney Ember, aNew York Times reporter assigned to cover Sanders, was regularly citing criticism of the candidate by his ideological opponents. "Morover," wrote Halper, "many of these 'experts' are corporate lobbyists, whose work in a particular area is not guided by academic, journalistic or other professional standards, but by the economic and political interests of their clients." Ember was citing such sources as neutral authorities, without properly disclosing these conflicts.^[36] The following month, Halper documented a number of instances in which cable news networkMSNBC employed graphics that distorted polling and donor data to Sanders' detriment.^[47]

In July 2019,Politico put forth the idea that the Sanders campaign's perception of bias may be an artifact of Sanders propensity to decline informal interviews at "press gaggles" after events and his reluctance to focus on breaking news.^[48] At the end of the month, Sanders' campaign manager (Faiz Shakir) was invited to CNN'sReliable Sources to talk with Brian Stelter about media bias. Shakir criticized debates and talking head spots on networks like CNN being interspersed with pharmaceutical industry commercials. When asked what issues the campaign wanted to discuss more than the daily dissection of Trump's tweets, Shakir spoke ofregulatory capture.^[49]

In August 2019, Sanders said thatThe Washington Post "doesn't write particularly good articles about" him and suggested that it was because he frequently mentioned thatAmazon did not pay taxes.^[50][51]Marty Baron, executive editor ofTheWashington Post, stated in response, "Contrary to the conspiracy theory the senator seems to favor, Jeff Bezos allows our newsroom to operate with full independence, as our reporters and editors can attest."^[51] Sanders rejected that his claim was a conspiracy theory.^[52] NPR wrote that Sanders's comments bore similarities to Trump's criticism of the media.^[52] CNN columnist Chris Cillizza said that Sanders had no evidence for his claims.^[53]

In the same month, theWashington Post deemed false Sanders's claim that "500,000 people go bankrupt every year because they cannot pay their outrageous medical bills". Journalists disputed the article's finding and said that the claim was true, citing a study in theAmerican Journal of Public Health.^[54][55] TheColumbia Journalism Review published Sanders' "plan for journalism", in which he repeated his opposition to accelerating media consolidation and the concomitant layoffs in local newsrooms, issues which had already led him to vote against the1996 Telecommunications Act. In analyzing root causes of inadequate media coverage, Sanders said that today public relations personnel outnumbered journalists six to one.^[56][57]

In November 2019, Emma Specter atVogue doubted that there was a conspiracy against Sanders. However, she listed several examples of bias and interpreted lack of coverage of Sanders on certain issues and events as slightly unfair.^[58]

In the same month,In These Times analyzed coverage of the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary by MSNBC between August and September 2019.^[59][60] They found that "MSNBC talked about Biden twice as often as Warren and three times as often as Sanders", and that Sanders was the candidate spoken of negatively the most frequently of the three. They also found that "[o]verall, MSNBC's primary coverage was devoid of policy discussion."^[61] Also in November 2019,Politico reported that Biden had received nearly three times more cable news coverage than Sanders and Warren.^[62]

In a December 2019 opinion column for the NYT,David Leonhardt agreed withJohn F. Harris — the co-founder ofPolitico — about the media having acentrist bias. Leonardt argued this hurt Sanders and Warren — particularly in questions posed to both about the issue of awealth tax.^[63] In the same month,Ryan Grim ofThe Intercept used examples of media coverage and the preceding month'sIn These Times analysis to argue that the media misreported on or omitted coverage of Sanders instead of treating him as a "top-tier candidate." He hypothesized that this alleged "Bernie Blackout" was a positive for Sanders, as it could prevent him from receiving the level of criticism that other front-running candidates typically receive.^[64]

• Media bias in the United States
• Hostile media effect

• Bernie Sanders
• Controversies of the 2016 United States presidential election
• Media bias controversies

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