"The media’s lying to you about Bernie Sanders ..." (crossposted)

[Babel_17]

(This is a crosspost from GD Primaries.) http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251668191

http://www.salon.com/2015/10/12/the_medias_lying_to_you_about_bernie_sanders_this_is_why_a_socialist_can_win_the_fox_loving_red_states/#

The media’s lying to you about Bernie Sanders: This is why a socialist can win the Fox-loving red states
I spent days with Sanders fans across red states. They watch Fox, live in the heartland, and are voting for Bernie
Rick Perlstein, Washington Spectator

Really inspiring journalism from an on the ground reporter.

I often wonder if there's a correlation between the compensation talking heads get now versus what they got 40 years ago, or even 20 years ago, that would go to explain the rightward shift in American politics.

Politics of the very wealthy, for the very wealthy, as reported on by the very wealthy.

Click the link for the Salon article to see that there's reason for lots of hope.

[eridani]

1. Conversations with red-staters from article

It’s July 20, and my airplane seat mate asks what brought me to Texas. He is a construction company sales executive from Houston. He’s watching Fox News on his cell phone. He tells me he considers himself a conservative. I tell him I’m a political reporter covering the Bernie Sanders campaign. He perks up: “I like what I’ve heard from him. Kind of middle of the road.”

Eleven days later, I’m at a Bernie Sanders house party in the depressed steel town of Griffith, Indiana, in a state that places in the bottom quartile on Silver’s chart. I approach a young man in his twenties wearing a thrift store T-shirt. I ask him what brings him here tonight.

“I’m just helping out my friends because they asked me to help out,” he tells me. He adds that he’s a conservative: “But I approve of some of the stuff that Bernie stands for. Like appealing to more than just the one percent and just trying to give everybody a leg up who’s needing it these days.” Data-driven analysis is only as good as the categories by which you sift the information. If you’ve already decided that “liberals” are the people who prefer locally sourced arugula to eating at McDonald’s, or are the people who don’t watch Fox News, it is a reasonable conclusion that there aren’t enough “liberals” out there to elect Bernie Sanders. Yet political categories shift. One of the things the best politicians do is work to shift them.

Sanders has been extraordinarily clear about the kind of shift he’d like to effect: Republicans “divide people on gay marriage. They divide people on abortion. They divide people on immigration. And what my job is, and it’s not just in blue states. . . [is] to bring working people together around an economic agenda that works. People are sick and tired of establishment politics; they are sick and tired of a politics in which candidates continue to represent the rich and the powerful.”