Robert Reich's comments on latest media coverage of Bernie

[DirkGently]

18. I often defend "the press." Getting harder to do.

I trained as a journalist, and have rolled my eyes for years at the "liberal bias" fallacy concocted to rationalize the pure propaganda machine that is Fox News.

And I likewise get frustrated with progressives who blame their perception that their favored truths aren't discussed enough on some unlikely global conspiracy among "mainstream media." By and large the press is not a monolithic thing, and it therefore doesn't make plans or push agendas as whole, because it's trying frantically to make some money, and not doing very well at it.

Largely, the "mainstream media" reflects whatever viewers and readers are demanding. It is not organized well enough to lie to us for fun or profit (except for Fox) even if it wanted to.

But I'm starting to see the treatment of the current U.S. Presidential primary season as, if not a deliberate plot, a queerly uniform willingness to emphasize and de-emphasize that doesn't line up with any kind of journalistic logic I'm familiar with.

My beloved MSNBC, home of Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow and Chris Kornacki, has been leading every show I have watched, for weeks, with 100% DONALD TRUMP. Hayes literally devoted the first five minutes of a recent broadcast to showing, without commentary, a modestly-attended Trump speech in Alabama, wherein he rented out a huge stadium and then proceeded not to fill it. A large portion of the remainder of the show, and in fact most of Hayes' and Maddow's recent shows, then went on to discuss Trump, his latest outrages, and what everyone on the planet has to say about the unexpected continuing existence of his campaign.

There is some excuse for this. Trump's a television star. He's demagoguing about giant anti-Mexico walls. He's following very little of the modern Republican script, which is supposed to be easing up, not doubling down on nativism. He's not talking about free trade or women's reproductive rights the way Republicans are supposed to. And he's leading the other dozen-plus would-be candidates in the polls. So he's worth some ink and some air time.

But contrast with the way Sanders is covered. Sanders isn't just doing the best splitting support among 15 or 16 or however many it is this week other candidates like Trump. He's pulling closer to a massively empowered and favored Democratic candidate, and drawing much larger crowds in doing so. And despite being a lifelong political leader, Sanders is nearly as unusual and unlikely a candidate. He wasn't supposed to get out of the gate with a Social Democrat platform, talking about expanding Social Security and Medicare; proposing a trillion-dollar investment in infrastructure. Those things were supposed to have been shoved off the table by conservative rhetoric long ago.

He is both more radical and more popular than Trump, but his ideas aren't coming from low-information voter's fears and fantasies.

These are American ideas, thought killed long ago by conservative rhetoric about the evils of taxes and government and anything else that doesn't accrue directly to the benefit of the wealthy.

How long has it been since a Presidential candidate has even come close to talking this way about the government's role in supporting the common good? How many Democrats have bought into the idea that Americans can't be made to listen to anything that can be characterized as "socialist?"

THAT is a news story. The fact that even MSNBC's deep-thinking policy wonks like Chris and Rachel can't seem to find the time to talk about it amidst all the chuckles and groans and eye-rolls over Trump strikes me as bizarre. I cannot imagine the editorial meeting where a 50-minute show that's supposed to be the thinking person's commentary on politics has time for 10-15 minutes on the Trump "phenomenon" and virtually zero to ask why Americans are getting behind the most FDR-like Dem to be taken seriously in 50 years.