The media message of Bernie-bro thuggery

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There are two stories about the Nevada Democratic Primary. One is that Sanders delegates were angry, violent, scary. That is the story we heard so often it must be true. The other is that they had reason to be angry, but that was the story that was buried.

Did Sanders supporters get violent in Nevada? Try to count the news media references to “violence,” “chair throwing,” and death threats.  News reporters and columnists a week later are still today referring to “hurling furniture” and chair-throwing.

But when you look for evidence, and trace the story back to its source, maybe only one chair was thrown. And when you look further, there is no evidence that even that one chair was thrown (there is a video that shows a guy raising the chair, putting it down, and getting a hug).
So the “violence” wasn’t a riot, it wasn’t Bernie-bro thugs beating up Hillary’s delegates.

Fact-checking: Find the source
What to do? The first step in the progressive’s grievance procedure is to send mostly polite but outraged emails to NPR ombudsman Elizabeth Jensen.  When she fact-checked the story (weren’t the reporters supposed to do that?), she found that the chair throwing was attributed to one prominent Las Vegas reporter, Jon Ralston — and he was apparently the original source for all of the  stories about chair-throwing. “When Ralston’s reporting came under question,” an NPR editor told Jensen, they “adjusted [their] language” and no longer used the word “thrown.” Instead, the next report referred to “physical skirmishes.” But Jensen demurred, saying references to violence was misleading: “violence … seems too strong a term to me based on the evidence I have seen so far.” Videos show pushing, shoving, screaming (must have all been by Sanders’ thugs).

It seems that Ralston himself didn’t witness the chair throwing or quote a witness;  he left before the “chair throwing” was supposed to have occurred, according to Snopes.com, which says there was no evidence any chair was thrown.

(The reporting about the harassing phone calls to  convention chairwoman Roberta Lange was largely accurate —furious sexist insults as well as moral outrage at “corruption” and  personal threats.)

Identifying the “real story”
A test of skill and honesty in journalism is in the journalist  identifies the “real story.” And here all the talk about “violence,” even if there had been violence, buried the real story. Should reporters be focusing on rowdiness and emails by nutters, or on Sanders’ claims that “the Democratic leadership used its power to prevent a fair and transparent process from taking place”?

Few of the reports explained why the Sanders activists had any reason to be angry. Some reports referred vaguely to accusations, but without the details. Sanders claimed rules were passed on a voice vote when most voted no, and no headcount was taken; 58 Sanders delegates were excluded without a hearing; the chair refused to allow any motions from the floor or accept petitions for amendments.  The Sanders delegates wanted a different convention chair, since chair Roberta Lange was a Clinton partisan, and didn’t want her to rule on the rules and prevent debate. Is the story about yelling delegates, or is it about whether they had something to yell about?

Please explain the explanation
Was this another “rigged” primary? A few specialist websites  explained Nevada’s very opaque caucus process in some detail. (Will someone please explain the explanations?) The clearest I read is by Politifact’s Riley Snyder, who says that the claims of unfairness are false. But read it and look at his assumptions about an uncounted voice vote, insufficient petition signatures that were also uncounted, and the exclusion of the 58 Sanders delegates. His report  “explained” the exclusion by quoting  credentials committee member Annette Magnus; but (look at her Twitter feed) he failed to identify her as a Clinton supporter who calls Lange her “friend and mentor.”  (There were only two people Snyder talked to for the article — Clinton’s committee woman and a casino spokesperson;  no Sanders activist was contacted.)

Why should reporters bother talking to “both sides,” if everyone already knows that Sanders is going to lose, that the rules are the rules and his amateurs just don’t know how to pack a caucus (except when they succeed, and that’s not fair) … and the only real rule is that you can’t challenge the rules. The readers who matter aren’t going to care about the details, and we all know what really happened anyway.

A Nevada Civics Lesson
So report the violence, framing the Sanders campaign as a lost cause … sore losers, their complaints about fairness are delegitimized by their violence and rudeness. And it all goes back to private corporations shaping the election rules to perpetuate their power, whether it’s arcane caucus procedures or suppressing the Sanders vote in Brooklyn.

Nevada and the others gave us the civics lesson we missed in high school. Maybe we knew there was a bit of a democracy deficit in campaign financing and in the two-party system, but did we realize that the parties were private corporations? That they can make up any rules they want for their primaries and caucuses and shape the rules to keep the elites in charge?

If we missed this in past primaries, our eyes fixed on the vote counts in the rites of democracy, maybe it was because then the candidates were all members of the club. But this time we have outsiders challenging the party establishments.

Don’t miss the media message
The “violence” does another kind of framing. Attacks on Bernie supporters now can have a progressive cover: Now we’ll see stories about “Bernie losing his halo: even progressives are criticizing him now after he’s shown a harder edge.” Or NPR’s follow-up: Nevada Incident Could Make It Difficult For Sanders’ Supporters To Back Clinton. Or “Liberal allies turning on Bernie Sanders after Nevada donnybrook.”

The media message: Progressives now have permission to support Hillary.

The real problem is that Sanders hasn’t dropped out and his campaign hurts the real candidate. Which is by now, like the chair-throwing, common knowledge.

One Response to The media message of Bernie-bro thuggery

  1. very clever. The kind of media analysis we need

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