How in the world could Richard Nixon be re-elected to the presidency after taking part in Watergate? When Sonoma State University (SSU) professor Carl Jensen asked this question in 1976, few could have predicted that he would turn it into an education project that transformed the lives of thousands of students and millions of readers. Jensen’s research concluded that Nixon was held to no noteworthy media scrutiny during his 1972 re-election bid because the corporate media ignored Watergate. However, the independent press had continued to note Nixon’s involvement in the crime, and eventually Nixon resigned.
Most academics would have completed a study like Jensen’s, published it, and begun the next project. Not Jensen. Jensen sought to ameliorate the societal problem of citizens receiving information from a propagandistic and inaccurate corporate media system. He began having his students compare corporate and independent news coverage every semester to document what was and was not being covered by corporate media. The top twenty-five independent news stories that were ignored by the corporate press were published in an annual list distributed for public consumption. Their project was dubbed Project Censored: The News that Didn’t Make the News, and it is now a forty-year bastion of media and democracy in action.
Some journalists and editors in the corporate media took issue with Jensen, arguing that the stories were not “censored” as he claimed, but due to time and space constraints could not be published, a decision they defended as part of “news judgment.” Jensen researched their claim and concluded that the corporate media often covered trivial and non-newsworthy stories at the expense of newsworthy stories. He called such coverage Junk Food News. Once again Jensen could have just let his research speak for itself, but instead he added a list of the corporate media’s Junk Food News to Project Censored’s annual publications.
When Jensen retired, Dr. Peter Phillips, a sociology professor at SSU, became the director of Project Censored. Phillips was convinced that the corporate media peddled propaganda that misinformed and misguided the public to adopt positions against their interests. Like Jensen, Phillips had his students investigate how mass media disseminate inaccurate and propagandistic stories. They began to document such instances and called them News Abuse, which refers to the corporate media stories that were newsworthy, but presented in a slanted, partial, or trivial manner.
As of 2016, the Junk Food News and News Abuse chapter focuses on the relationship between corporate media and social justice, equity, and diversity. This chapter, as part of celebrating the forty years of Project Censored, returns to the topic that was the genesis of Jensen’s idea: the relationship between media and presidential elections.
This year, we analyze the 2016 presidential primaries to illuminate the prevalence and use of Junk Food News and News Abuse in the corporate press. This year’s chapter examines Republican presidential candidate and billionaire Donald Trump’s twenty-four-hour cycle of Junk Food News. All of his outlandish behavior has been covered ad nauseam at the expense of far more newsworthy stories—not to mention other candidates, including third parties. The chapter concludes with a News Abuse study of how the corporate press peddles, misrepresents, and/or ignores stories of state crimes against democracy and human rights, as well as racism, sexism, and Islamophobia in the context of the presidential election, all while convincing the public to coronate Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party presidential candidate.
The past year’s news cycle saw both positive and negative signs about the influence of corporate media. For example, only 6 percent of the public has a positive view of the press in the US. That is roughly the same approval rating for Congress.2 However, most people still trust television news and social media to inform them about key issues of the day, including the 2016 presidential election.3 This is problematic, considering that those corporate outlets tend to slant their content toward the interests of those in power.4 Analysts argue this is why voters vote with the wealthy rather than for their own economic interests.5 Censorship remained a problem during the 2015–2016 news cycle.
In fact, a Pew Research Center study found that millennials (those born between 1982–2004) are more supportive of censoring speech and expression than the older generations.6 About 40 percent of millennials supported some form of censorship on free speech. For example, when South Carolina police officer Ben Fields slammed a young woman on the ground in a classroom because she would not leave her desk, the only person arrested was fellow student Niya Kenny, who acted as a whistleblower by videotaping the violent act.7 Furthermore, when Fields was fired for the incident—thanks in part to Kenny’s video—students protested his firing by wearing shirts that read “Free Fields” and “Bring Back Fields.”8 The students’ behavior may not be shocking, considering that they were raised on corporate media messages that normalized the views of those in power, from curtailing civil liberties via the USA PATRIOT Act to National Security Agency (NSA) spying, while privileging state secrets by attacking whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.9 This culture of censorship is so pervasive that the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Inspector General felt comfortable publicly claiming that the agency “accidently” deleted its only copy of the US Senate’s damning report about the CIA’s illegal use of torture.10
The inculcation of a generation in accepting censorship has allowed for the further decaying of the fourth estate. For example, when police slammed a CBS reporter for doing his job of covering a Trump rally, attendees screamed, “Go back to Iraq,” rather than note that police were arresting a journalist for using his First Amendment right of freedom of the press.11
In fact, last year, new evidence reminded the public of how censorship and media propaganda is not only prevalent, but morally questionable and at times even deadly. Newly declassified documents prove that conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr. and his magazine, the National Review, constructed a false image of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for Americans in the 1970s. This included covering up the thousands of individuals murdered in Chile under his rule and two people who were murdered in Washington, DC by a car bomb Pinochet had ordered. Buckley wanted to promote the false narrative that Pinochet’s rightwing assault on leftists was promoting freedom. As a result, he helped hide a multitude of human rights abuses and thousands of deaths from the US public.12
This type of framing is a form of propaganda and censorship that continues to the present. One startling recent example is that of the Fox News terrorist analyst who was arrested for impersonating a CIA agent on the network for over a decade.13 In the course of that decade, Fox News did irreparable damage to the public by having this person falsely inform viewers about foreign policy, civil liberties, and the CIA. However, no one at Fox was or ever has been arrested for impersonating a journalist. Meanwhile, Brian Williams, who completely fabricated multiple tales, including being in a helicopter crash in Iraq, to improve his public image, returned to the helm of the election desk for MSNBC during the election news cycle.14 Perhaps Williams brushed up on basic journalism school principles while on suspension.
The corporate press did discuss the important issue of censorship, but much of that discussion focused on it being a problem in other nations, and not the US. For example, the corporate media hammered Turkey for banning any coverage of “terror” bombings, and Russian President Vladimir Putin for censoring various news broadcasts.15 At the same time, in the US, CNN openly practiced censorship when it suspended global affairs correspondent Elise Labott for offering a critical perspective on the US policy toward Syria.16 Like Russia, the US also practices state censorship. In another example, from 2016, reporters were banned from the Virginia State Senate floor. They were literally told it was illegal for them to be present and report on those in power while they are making key decisions.17
Since Jensen developed Project Censored, new forms of censorship have arisen in the digital age. For example, just this past year, Outskirts Press (in conjunction with Amazon.com) censored a serial killer’s autobiography, Robert DeNiro was pressured to remove a controversial film on vaccines from his own film festival, and University of California, Davis paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a public relations firm to censor images and scrub the Web of one of their officers using unnecessary force against peaceful protesters in 2011.18 In a particularly egregious example of digital censorship, social media platform Facebook blocked a leak of 7,000 Hillary Clinton emails from whistleblower organization WikiLeaks.19 Facebook was also caught earlier this year specifically censoring some conservative sources on news feeds and trending stories. This kind of social media censorship is worrisome, considering that a majority of US citizens now claim to receive their news from Facebook and other social media platforms.20
This past year has provided such a dismal display of journalistic failures by the corporate press that it even drew the ire of some of those who have participated in and benefitted from its dysfunction. For example, Fox News host Greta Van Susteren was so enraged by the pathetic election coverage that she wrote a surprisingly astute article on how those who work in corporate media are largely unaware of the real anger that gave rise to the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders campaigns because they spend too much time with those in power.21 Let that statement sink in for a moment. Other reporters who retired from the press, such as Andrew Sullivan and Keith Olbermann, were so dismayed by the corporate media coverage of the primaries that they publicly announced that they felt a “civic duty” to come out of retirement and cover the elections.22 Finally, President Barack Obama, who has benefitted from the corporate media’s celebrity culture, lambasted the corporate media for covering the election like a celebrity reality show. He said, “What I’m concerned about is the degree to which reporting and information starts emphasizing the spectacle and the circus. Because that’s not something we can afford . . . The American people, they’ve got good judgment, they’ve got good instincts—as long as they get good information.”23 Judging by the contents of this chapter, the American people are still waiting for that kind of information.
Earlier this year, in the wake of the Panama Papers, people in countries around the world sought to remove leaders from power for their knowledge of and/or participation in hiding offshore monies to avoid taxation. Meanwhile, in the US, Americans were immersed in a vapid celebrity-worshipping culture, one that has invaded nearly every facet of life—even infecting the democratic process and elections.24 Even as the two leading corporate party candidates for presidential nomination were both under legal clouds of potential investigations, looming indictments, and other controversies, corporate media focused more on bread and circus acts, serving up a full menu of Junk Food News and News Abuse in lieu of real, hard-hitting election year journalism. A brief sampler platter of distractions include the Fox News panel that debated if mathematics should be required in schools; the NBC reporter who touted the network’s ethics before storming into the home of murder suspects in San Bernardino; and the Fox debate over Ronald Reagan that concluded with pot George Will and kettle Bill O’Reilly calling each other a “hack.”25 In other words, corporate media served up an anemic news diet.
Trivial stories and celebrity demagoguery were mainstays of the 2016 presidential primary season. While Americans stayed glued to the corporate media’s embarrassing exercise in entertainment deceitfully presented as democracy, the independent press published numerous newsworthy stories. For one key example, consider how the corporate media focused on election gossip and some of the aforementioned non-issues while diminishing their coverage of police violence. The independent press, however, continued to cover police killings of unarmed people of color that terrorize communities around the country.26 Comparably, while the corporate media argued that democracy depends on choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the independent press covered real displays of civic action, like the Democracy Spring, a protest movement against the influence of money in politics. In April of 2016, seven hundred people were arrested in Washington, DC as part of these protests, which received little-to-no corporate media coverage.27 So, while some of the Junk Food News of the 2016 presidential primary season may make one laugh, it is only funny until one realizes that the joke is on us—We the People.
Trump first appeared in the Junk Food News section of Project Censored in the 1990 story “The Marital Woes of Donald and Ivana Trump.” Now in 2015–16, Trump has moved from a junk husband to a junk candidate. In the summer of 2015, the corporate media began to notice the profitable potential of the reality television star’s presidential campaign.28 Consumers were captivated by Trump’s outrageous behavior. In fact, Les Moonves, chairman of the board, president, and CEO of CBS, admitted that Trump coverage led to increased profits when he noted, “I’ve never seen anything like this, and this [is] going to be a very good year for us . . . Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going . . . [I]t may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”29 In fact, former CBS anchorman Dan Rather warned that Trump and the media act as business partners.30 The corporate media’s obsession with The Donald helped change the US democratic process to an unholy hybrid of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and American Idol.31 In fact, 75 percent of Americans agreed that the corporate media covered Trump too often.32
Viewers had reason to be upset with the corporate media coverage. On the road to presumptive party nomination at the convention, Trump, more than any candidate from either major corporate party, dominated the election coverage. In fact, by spring, Trump had received nearly triple the coverage of Hillary Clinton.33 That equates to $2 billion in free coverage for Trump.34 For example, in a single twenty-four-hour news cycle, a story about or ad for Trump ran sixty times on Fox, MSNBC, and CNN at no cost to Trump.35 In fact, MSNBC was so overjoyed to interview Trump on his private jet that they played the interview seventy-nine times over a three day period. This is problematic, considering that studies have shown that the more a candidate is covered, the higher they rise in the polls.36
In comparison to Trump, the Sanders campaign received only onethird of the amount of media coverage.37 In actual airtime, Trump’s campaign received eighty-one times more airtime than Sanders.38 Perhaps one of the most glaring examples of this media snub would be from March 2016, when Fox, CNN, and MSNBC decided to cover every candidate’s primary election speech except for Sanders’.39 Instead of covering Sanders’s speech, they had a camera on an empty podium waiting for Trump to arrive and give his speech.40 We’ll let the reader make the inference there.
However, curiously, earlier in the month, there was no shortage of corporate media coverage of Sanders—so long as that coverage was negative. In one egregious example, the Washington Post ran sixteen hit pieces on Sanders’s campaign in as many hours between March 6 and 7, which just so happened to be on the cusp of an important Democratic candidate debate in Flint, Michigan. This wasn’t the first time the Post targeted Sanders, either. One wonders what relationship the owner of the Washington Post, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, might have with Clinton, as in her final year as Secretary of State, Bezos’s company received a $16.5 million contract from the US State Department. Further, Amazon received a ten-year $600 million contract from several intelligence agencies, including the CIA, an organization which Sanders stated he wanted to abolish in 1974 and which he still has serious issues with at present.41 Sanders’s analysis and information was literally trumped by the US corporate deep state media.42 As Les Moonves of CBS said, “Bring it on, Donald. Keep going . . .”
The junk coverage of Trump was heavily focused on his public fights and insults. He called Senator Ted Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” and Senator Marco Rubio a “lightweight choker.”43 The corporate media’s favorite battle, though, was Trump’s war with the host of Fox News’s the Kelly File, Megyn Kelly. In August 2015, the bad blood began when Kelly moderated a Republican primary debate and confronted Trump about his sexist comments about women, which included phrases such as “‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’”44 Trump attacked Kelly and the question rather than explain his actions. He then publicly stated that “[t]here was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”45 Rather than ignore his comments, the corporate media dedicated a massive amount of coverage to the story, “Megyn Kelly Going on Vacation Following Heated GOP Debate and Donald Trump ‘Blood’ Comments.” Days after the episode with Trump, Kelly announced her ten-day vacation plans. The corporate media reported on Kelly with stories such as “R&R for Megyn Kelly.”46 The coverage of Kelly and Trump’s war came at the expense of a Common Dreams story titled “As of Today, Humanity Has Exhausted its 2015 Supply of Natural Resources,” arguing that the world is operating on an “ecological deficit—accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and depleting the planet for future generations.”47 This story is far more newsworthy than the Trump and Kelly war for its imperative implications regarding the future sustainability of life as we know it on Earth.
The corporate media continued to manufacture the Trump and Kelly war through early 2016. Fox, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others covered how Trump had asked via Twitter that “everybody” boycott her show because it’s “always a hit on Trump!”48 He projected onto Kelly that she was “sick, & the most overrated person on TV.”49 Trump’s tweets distracted from such stories as “Choking to Death in Detroit: Flint Isn’t Michigan’s Only Disaster” by Zoë Schlanger writing for Newsweek. Her article reported that a large amount of civilians with asthma living in Detroit, Michigan, are literally choking to death.50 Again, this environmental reality, which could ultimately impact millions in more heavily polluted US cities, was ignored to focus on a war of words between a reality TV star turned presidential candidate and a Fox “news” personality.
In addition to Kelly versus Trump, the corporate media dedicated precious time and space to “The Wife Feud.” By late March of 2016, the Republican presidential primary ignored policy in favor of debating who had a more attractive wife. The high school banter began when an anti-Trump super PAC released a campaign advertisement that included a provocative picture of Trump’s wife, Melania. Trump responded by posting a picture of his wife with captions that compared her to Cruz’s wife, Heidi.51 Trump took to Twitter, writing, “Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!” The reference to Cruz’s wife received a reserved reaction from Cruz on Twitter, “Donald, real men don’t attack women. Your wife is lovely, and Heidi is the love of my life.” The episode could have died there, but hours later Cruz tweeted that Trump was “a sniveling coward,” and tweeted to “leave Heidi the hell alone.” The 140-character war was covered by MSNBC, Fox, CNN, the New York Times, and others.52 “The Wife Feud” distracted from Tariq Ali’s story, written for CounterPunch, titled “Joker Rules: The Crackdown on Press Freedom in Turkey.” Ali wrote about how Turkey was attempting to punish him for calling the president of Turkey a joker.53 Stories about threatened press freedoms are exactly what people need to be aware of, as they are, dare say, still more newsworthy than even “The Wife Feud.”
When the corporate media was not covering Trump’s distracting feuds, they were covering his junk, literally, in an exquisite example of a Junk Food News story. In March of 2016, the corporate media became obsessed with the story, “Trump and the Small Hands Equals Small Manhood Myth, or Reality?” It began when Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio implied that Trump’s penis must be small because he has small hands. At the following debate, Trump addressed the remark while on stage with Rubio, stating, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.”54 ABC, CNN, CBS, NBC, Time, Variety, and others dedicated a massive amount of coverage to the debate over Trump’s junk, with titles such as “Donald Trump Defends Size of His Penis,” “Trump Defends Making His Manhood a Big Issue,” and “The History Behind the Donald Trump ‘Small Hands’ Insult.”55 While the corporate press was fixated on the alleged size of Trump’s junk, Medea Benjamin and Rebecca Green, writing for Foreign Policy in Focus, reported that newly released documents exposed how then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton provided arms to Saudi Arabia.56 The story gave rise to questions about Clinton’s war-hawk mentality, financial corruption, and her hypocritical claims that she represents women’s interests, while weaponizing a country that heavily limits women’s rights.57 Their report circulated across the independent press, but the corporate media evidently felt that presidential penile speculation was more important.
Even when Trump did not supply fodder for the corporate media, they simply invented Junk Food News discussions about Trump. For example, on April 19, 2016, Trump won the New York State Republican primary. The victory was unsurprising, considering it was his home state and no polls predicted a tight race, let alone a loss for Trump. Rather than shift their coverage to a newsworthy story, such as election fraud and voter suppression claims in New York during the primary, the corporate media focused on how Trump’s victory speech in New York was “presidential.”58 The night of the primary, the corporate media began a week-long discussion about how Trump was shedding his insulting buffoonery and gruff behavior in order to be taken seriously as a candidate. They even broke down his speech, noting that he used verbs instead of adjectives and placed both hands on the podium when he spoke.59 Perhaps if they had spent less time studying his stance and vocabulary, they could have fact-checked him. Five reporters at the Huffington Post looked at a 12,000-word transcript of a one-hour Trump speech and found that he made seventy-one claims that were “inaccurate, misleading or deeply questionable.”60 However, even when outlets such as NPR criticized Trump for his false remarks, they were quick to distance themselves from being seen as a legitimate news organization by emphasizing that it was a contributor, and not a journalist, who made the critique.61 One problem with NPR’s statement stands out—the contributor in question was actually Cokie Roberts, and whether one likes or agrees with her or not, she is a longtime journalist and analyst (and one who worked at NPR until 1992). While Roberts opined on Trump’s candidacy and what it meant for the Republican Party, she did so with the evidence that he makes wildly inaccurate claims. Regardless of her views on the election, her discussion of Trump’s falsehoods constituted demonstrably factual statements. While NPR focused on Roberts’ possible partisanship, they seemed to miss the thesis of her discussion—that Trump peddles relentless falsehoods and it’s the media’s job to note that. It was as if NPR was apologizing for reporting accurately about reality. It is enough to make one’s head swirl.
Junk Food News has evolved since Jensen first developed the concept. While it has not become any more informative, it now exists in a variety of media, and certainly propagates on the Internet more than ever before. The Internet is where junk is created, discussed, shared, and sometimes circulated and picked up by the traditional corporate press. For example, in February 2016, online media buzzed with a rumor that Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz was the Zodiac Killer. Memes appeared on social media featuring Cruz side by side with a sketch of the murder suspect. It took off like wildfire, with numerous articles and conspiracies associated with Cruz and the Zodiac popping up on the Web. Then a Florida poll revealed that just over one-third of Florida voters claimed they were unsure whether or not Cruz was the Zodiac Killer.62 Cruz’s wife, Heidi, responded, noting that “[t]here’s a lot of garbage out there . . . Well, I’ve been married to him for 15 years and I know pretty well who he is.”63 MSNBC mused over whether or not Cruz made a veiled reference to the Zodiac conspiracy during his appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!64 Cruz became the center of similar Internet fodder after an image of twenty-one-year-old Searcy Hayes passed around social media because she resembled Cruz, while she was a guest on the tabloid talk show Maury. This vapid social media post was soon picked up by corporate media.65 The press coverage helped launch Hayes to instant fame, which included a $10,000 deal to record a six-minute scene in a pornographic film.66
Similar to the Cruz Internet distractions, in March 2016, the corporate media was fixated on how a bird landed on Bernie Sanders’s podium at his Portland, Oregon rally.67 Reportedly, there was “thunderous applause of the crowd,” with “a Disney princess meme tak[ing] flight,” as a result.68 After the bird landed, Sanders said, “I think there may be some symbolism here. I know it doesn’t look like it, but that bird is really a dove asking us for world peace. No more wars.”69 The freak occurrence of a bird landing, which happens only irregularly, was covered by CNN, US News & World Report, Fortune, the New York Post, the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and USA Today, among others.70 That it happened in Portland, home of the popular cable comedy program Portlandia, contributed to the generation of countless memes based on one of the show’s skits and songs, “Put a Bird on It.” For the corporate media, “Birdie Sanders” was born, which seemed to garner more attention than his speeches or policy positions.
While the corporate media was engulfed in Birdie coverage, the independent outlet the Intercept released their report, “Israeli Rights Group Releases Video of Army Medic Executing Wounded Palestinian Suspect.”71 The story, which reported the execution of an unarmed and injured Palestinian by an Israeli soldier, reiterates ongoing tensions between Israelis and Palestinians, as well as demonstrates human rights abuses by the US-backed Israeli forces. Near 2015’s end, Human Rights Watch published documentation of violence and tension between Israelis and Palestinians throughout the year, stating that “Palestinians killed at least 17 Israeli civilians and 3 Israeli soldiers, and injured 87 Israeli civilians and 80 security officers in the West Bank and Israel as of November 27. Israeli security forces killed at least 120 and injured at least 11,953 Palestinian civilians in West Bank, Gaza, and Israel as of the same date, including bystanders, protesters, and suspected assailants.”72 If only a birdie would land on a podium in the West Bank, perhaps the media might begin to pay some attention.
During the 2016 election cycle, the corporate media was not just peddling junk disguised as journalism, but propaganda disguised as news. The corporate media inserted themselves into stories just like the camerawoman who tripped escaping refugees from Syria.74 They inundated viewers with a barrage of outdated and inaccurate adages, such as “the parties will have to listen to the people” and “this is an historic election” to distract from the corporate hijacking of the democratic process. In fact, the corporate media censored the pervasive corporate influence on the democratic process, from the role of socalled dark money to the news media itself. For example, MSNBC and CNN edited out several lines from a video where Sanders attacked the corporate media for failing to fulfill its role in reporting all-important issues in the election, including the issue of corporate media biases.75
The corporate media’s refusal to delineate between fact and opinion, slant and bias, perspective and falsehood, allowed the election coverage to co-opt serious issues of equity and social justice including racial and gender prejudice, immigration, climate change, human rights, sexuality, and civil liberties. Furthermore, it allowed for political falsehoods to permeate the corporate media echo chamber, such as Rubio’s claim that welders have a higher income than those who major in philosophy, or Trump’s claims that he predicted 9/11, that Mexico was sending rapists to the US, that Obama was taking 200,000 Syrian refugees, that a table full of steaks, water, and wine prove he is a successful business man, and that he helped move a Ford Motor plant from Mexico to Ohio.76
Youth and social media played a major role in the presidential primary, as they have since 2008. A GOP pollster argued that the youth are terrifyingly liberal.77 In fact, by mid-March 2016, Sanders had received 1.5 million youth votes; that is more than Clinton and Trump combined.78 Still, the corporate media worked to spread cynicism among the youth. For instance, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said that the youth should not waste their time supporting Sanders when the race is already “rigged” for Clinton.79 This cynicism ignores several prominent youth-led victories, such as when Maine became the first state to abolish superdelegates.80 Rather than take the youth acrimony seriously, the Clinton campaign went on the defensive. Bill Clinton ignored how his policies contributed to the present climate of discontent among the youth, and instead blamed them for their current state of affairs. He argued that, had they voted to prevent a Republican Congress in 2010, there would not be so many problems facing the nation.81 Similarly, in the digital age, it is not just television that spreads apathy and support for a corporate candidate, but corporate-run social media. For example, a Clinton super PAC and lobbyist group wrote a pro-Clinton op-ed for Atlanta, Georgia, Mayor Kasim Reed, paying handsomely to spread the op-ed across the Internet. The article offered few facts in denouncing Bernie Sanders.82 In a similar case, a Clinton super PAC, Correct The Record, is “pledging to spend $1 million to ‘push back against’ users on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram” who criticize Clinton.83
The 2015–16 election coverage news cycle was a stunning example of News Abuse in action. Since Phillips coined the term, the forms and tools that shape America’s News Abuse have changed, but the propaganda and deceit remain constant. In the 2015–16 news cycle, the corporate media slanted coverage to coronate Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee. This year’s News Abuse study examines the corporate media’s coverage of the Democratic primary.
Before the primary season even began, the corporate media were touting the narrative that Clinton was the frontrunner for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. They made this claim despite the fact that, since late 2015, Bernie Sanders led in numerous national polls over every Republican by more points than Clinton.84 The corporate media narrative that Clinton was the frontrunner became selffulfilling after their coverage included misleading delegate counts, slanted analysis, a redefining of progressivism, censorship of a corrupted party committing state crimes against democracy, and a premature declaration of her victory before the primary was over and the convention even held. This is the result of a codependency Clinton and the corporate media seem to have fostered with one another.
Since she led the 1990s health care debate, Hillary Clinton and the corporate press have cultivated a mutually dependent relationship. Clinton needs positive media coverage to reverse her poor public image. Polling has found that 50 percent of the US population have a negative view of Clinton, and only 22 percent of the population hold a favorable image of the former Secretary of State.85 Clinton spent over $1 million on online trolls with the purpose of “correcting” the negative statements about her.86 She tried to manage public perception by maintaining a close relationship with the press. According to CNN’s Brian Stelter, in April 2015, before her announcement was official or a single primary speech had been delivered, Clinton met with members of the corporate media to discuss her talking points. The guests included “ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, and a half-dozen reporters from CNN . . . ” among dozens of others from corporate news outlets.87 Additionally, one of Clinton’s top financial supporters, Haim Saban, bought out the satirical news website, the Onion, and Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, is on the board of directors for InterActivCorp (IAC), a company that partially owns Newsweek, the Daily Beast, and numerous other news outlets.88
One clear reason the corporate press maintains a friendly relationship with the Clintons is that the Democratic Party and Comcast have vested economic interests. For instance, Comcast owns NBC and provides airtime to Democrats that support policies favorable to Comcast, such as trade deals, on MSNBC and shows like the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and Saturday Night Live. Clinton and Obama have both been beneficiaries of this slanted coverage.89 In another example, Precision Strategies, a firm largely responsible for Clinton’s campaign, sent its cofounder, Stephanie Cutter, on to NBC News’ Meet the Press to express her support for Clinton and her opposition to Sanders, without clearly stating during the broadcast that she is on Clinton’s payroll. Cutter is one of numerous examples of pro-Clinton talking heads consuming corporate media time and space without revealing their economic interests.90
Clinton’s rapport with the press has resulted in favorable coverage that hides or excuses her indiscretions. For example, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, “As we head toward the general election showdown, by all means denounce Hillary Clinton’s judgment and policy positions, but let’s focus on the real issues. She’s not a saint but a politician, and to me, this notion that she’s fundamentally dishonest is a bogus narrative.”91 Kristof’s contradictory piece took precious time to tell voters that politicians lie, and Clinton lies, but that the voters should trust her. Moreover, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that on the night of the first Democratic presidential primary debate, the corporate press pundits unanimously declared Clinton the winner, but the online polls showed that voters by margins as high as 65 percent believed that Sanders had won the debate.92 Also, the pro-Clinton slant in the corporate press was on full display when her rival Sanders appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. The interview quickly became a debate over Sanders’s proposals.93 Clinton has experienced nothing similar. Perhaps Matthews’s favoritism stems from his wife, Kathleen Matthews, being a financial supporter for Hillary Clinton.94 Lastly, CBS used a Harvard poll to show how Clinton had a six-point lead over Sanders, but the actual poll stated something entirely different. Sanders had 41 percent of the vote among millennial voters, and a sixpoint lead over Clinton.95 According to the corporate media, accuracy seems to matter about as much as honesty, and they have fostered strained relations with both.
During the election cycle, corporate media inundated Americans with opinion, popularity, and delegate polls, and then used the results to legitimize Clinton’s inevitable victory narrative. Polling dominated a majority of election coverage, yet often polls have proven to be incredibly inaccurate and to contain no newsworthy information.96 Common pitfalls in polling include the types of questions posed, the methods of collection, and the lack of random samples.97 In addition, a poll’s data can quickly be rendered obsolete. For example, the polls in the month leading up to the Michigan primary incorrectly predicted defeat for Sanders.98 In a rare appearance on CNN, Pacifica’s Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman criticized the use of polls in corporate media election coverage and recommended diverting those resources into substantial candidate research and investigation.99 Rather than fulfill Goodman’s request, the corporate media continued to use the polls as a form of News Abuse, and to ignore that Clinton’s inevitable victory narrative was dependent upon their slanted coverage.100 According to a study in 2015, Clinton amassed 80 percent of Democratic Party airtime.101 The correlation between amount of air time and poll numbers suggests that the disparity in coverage favoring Clinton made her party coronation, inevitably, a self-fulfilling corporate media prophecy.102
The manipulations, omissions, and outright lies were compounded by the corporate media’s convoluted coverage of the already confusing Democratic primary nomination system. To become the Democratic presidential nominee, a candidate must win 2,383 delegates. Delegates are pledged supporters of candidates, while superdelegates are free to vote for any candidate in their party. Superdelegates hold a lot of power, since they can swing the results to nominate the candidate who did not receive the majority of votes during the primary. As if this undemocratic dilemma isn’t complex enough, states that hold caucuses rather than primaries revert to a coin-toss when the candidates receive an equal amount of delegates.103 Corporate media were not entirely clear on how this process worked, and certainly didn’t deign to suggest for whom it was beneficial.
As this book goes to the publisher in June 2016, we note that the superdelegate votes are not cast until the Democratic National Convention in late July. However, the corporate media reached out to superdelegates to find out how they would vote before the primary began. The corporate media assessed that there were nearly five hundred superdelegates voting for Clinton before the primary began, which is almost 25 percent of the delegates she needed to declare victory.104 Even though the superdelegates can change their minds any time before July’s convention, the corporate media continued to count the superdelegates in their primary tally between Sanders and Clinton.105 As a result, the corporate media sent a message that Clinton was so far ahead in delegates that Sanders’s campaign was futile.106 In a classic display of News Abuse, the corporate press included superdelegates to demonstrate Clinton’s lead, but did not include undeclared superdelegates in the amount of delegates remaining. This coverage meant that viewers saw a lead for Clinton that was larger than what actually existed and an amount of remaining delegates for Sanders that was fewer than what actually existed. The corporate media delegate count is an example of the most dishonest and inherently undemocratic News Abuse, as they prematurely, even falsely, declared Clinton the victor in the primary.
Despite lacking enough pledged delegates to clinch the nomination, the corporate press declared Clinton the victor in the Democratic Party primary on June 6, 2016, the night before six states, including delegate-rich California and New Jersey, had their primaries.107 The announcement came after a two-week period where Sanders was leading in many polls, including in California, and it had been announced that Clinton was under an FBI investigation. The announcement of her perceived nomination, which ran on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, New York Times, Huffington Post, Associated Press, and more, included a graphic that had been created and approved between the corporate media and the Clinton campaign the weekend before the announcement.108 The announcement was especially odd considering that they based the result on the primary in Puerto Rico that had voted two days earlier, not to mention the corporate press took months to calculate and add in the Washington State delegates which went to Sanders, who had won nearly 70 percent of the vote. Nonetheless, as voters went to the polls on June 7, 2016, the corporate press told them it was useless to vote, Clinton had won, and that citizens should recognize the historic event of the first woman to be a presidential nominee for a major (corporate-backed) party. In fact, the corporate media announced Clinton as the winner of the California primary by nearly 400,000 votes despite the fact that another 2.6 million ballots had still not been counted by mid-June. As of this writing, several California counties have already flipped for Sanders, that is, once all the ballots were counted.109 What a novel approach it would be, to actually count all the ballots in an election before declaring a winner.
In another form of News Abuse, during the campaign cycle, the corporate media slanted their coverage to declare Clinton as a progressive. In the corporate media narrative, the Democrats represent the far left and Republicans the far right. The presidential race on the Democratic side demonstrated that the Clinton Democrats are indistinguishable from the moderate Republicans in the problematic left/ right binary metric. However, as part of the coronation of Clinton, the corporate media continued to spin their tales of “the progressive” Clinton while bashing Sanders as “unrealistic.”
The term “progressive” generally refers to an individual who seeks to use government to protect equality and individual liberty in the face of small-government traditionalists. Clinton’s history and public statements leave no doubt that she is not a progressive. She has repeatedly held anti-progressive views until public sentiment overwhelmingly opposes those views. For example, she opposed same-sex marriage until 2013 and actively promoted fracking until 2016.110 She also did not fight for progressive causes when she was in a position to make a difference. For example, she refused to speak up against Walmart’s opposition to unions while she was on the board of Walmart for six years, and as Secretary of State she was decidedly hawkish on foreign affairs.111
Clinton is so emblematic of a non-progressive philosophy that she has garnered support from several prominent neo-conservatives and individuals that utterly oppose the progressive agenda. For example, billionaire Charles Koch, a notorious scourge of leftists as he infuses the political system with cash to further his corporate agenda at the expense of progressive change, has said that Clinton is the best candidate for conservatives.112 Similarly, the conservative Wall Street Journal has referred to Clinton as “The Conservative Hope.”113 In fact, fiftysix business leaders, many of whom are Republicans, have endorsed Clinton for the Presidency.114
Clinton went to great lengths to conceal her anti-progressive perspectives. She refused to publicly release her paid speeches to Wall Street bankers and has literally blasted electronic noise so loud at some of her private events that the press cannot hear her speeches to wealthy donors.115 Furthermore, she is a favorite of Wall Street, which donated $4.2 million for her primary campaign alone.116 Similarly, Clinton has received millions in donations from Donald Trump, who is possibly “The Least Charitable Billionaire,” as well as Jeb Bush’s education company.117 Her anti-progressive agenda is so well known that supporters have taken to claiming that Clinton is a “closet progressive.” This means that everything she does and says publicly is not progressive, but voters should believe without evidence that once in office her progressive ideals will come out.118 One wonders if she also has a great deal to offer the public on some swampland for sale in Florida.
The corporate media falsified Clinton’s progressive credentials by ignoring the influence of corporate cash on the Clinton campaign. Missing from the corporate media coverage is any discussion of why the plutocracy donates to the Clinton campaign. Clinton has argued that the money she receives, such as $675,000 from Goldman Sachs, does not influence her policies.119 She holds up her support of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (usually referred to simply as the “Dodd-Frank Act”) as evidence of her anti-Wall Street corruption credentials. However, the act was so influenced by banking and corporate lobbying that it provides regulators with no real power or tools to hold banks accountable. As a result, the “prosecutions of financial and other professionalized crimes in the United States are at their lowest level in 20 years.”120 Clinton also cited her support for the Affordable Care Act as evidence of her progressive qualifications, but did not mention that many of her advisers and contributors worked vigorously to oppose it.121 She also opposed an actual progressive proposal for healthcare reform, one supported by a majority of doctors and nurses, for single-payer health coverage.
During the 2016 election cycle, the corporate press tirelessly framed Clinton as a progressive and Sanders as unrealistic. In the face of mounting criticism about her lack of progressive credentials, Clinton declared, “I’m a progressive who gets things done.”122 The line was meant to insinuate that even though she is not as progressive as Sanders, or not at all, she wants to accomplish goals. Rather than point out the ridiculous nature of her non sequitur, the corporate press followed her line by attacking Sanders and arguing that Clinton is a progressive. For example, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman commonly used the phrase “very serious people” to pejoratively attack Republicans, but in the 2016 campaign he used it against Sanders.123 In addition, the Washington Post, in the midst of publishing sixteen negative articles about Sanders in a span of sixteen hours, falsely asserted that Sanders’s education plan would cost $3.27 trillion.124 The Washington Post is owned by the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who has (as we noted earlier) recently secured contracts with the CIA worth $600 million; though perhaps it is a coincidence that Bezos’s media company would viciously attack a candidate who has publicly criticized the CIA.125 Other outlets falsified the impact of Sanders’s proposed plans. For example, the New York Times claimed that leftist economists have concluded that Sanders’s proposals are economically impossible. However, the same economists actually admitted that they have no evidence to determine the impact of some of Sanders’s proposals.126 Rather than point out that Sanders is a real progressive and reveal the false nature of the long-held corporate media narrative that says Democrats are the party of the far left, the corporate press assailed Sanders as unrealistic and Clinton as a progressive, further obfuscating the rightward shift of the Democratic Party establishment.
As part of the Clinton coronation, the corporate media did not widely report on or demand accountability for the colluding efforts of the Clinton campaign, Democratic Party, White House, and plutocracy in general to undermine Sanders’s bid for the Democratic nomination. Despite the corporate media narrative that Democrats are the liberal or left wing (read: the anti-corporate party), the Democratic National Committee (DNC) is directed by mass corporate funding and influence.127 For example, one of the biggest companies and highest-ranking corporations among consumer discontent, Comcast, has a special seat at the Democratic Convention.128 Similarly, many of the superdelegates supporting Clinton are corporate lobbyists who are paid by private prison corporations, private health care insurers opposed to the Affordable Care Act, and even Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.129 Furthermore, the former Congressman Barney Frank will be overseeing the DNC platform creation while managing a major bank.130 The Sanders campaign has demonstrated that there is a large contingent of real progressives in the US who recognize and oppose the corporate agenda of the DNC. However, their voices have mostly gone unheard. In fact, the DNC packed convention committees with delegates who created a platform that largely supports the corporate agenda of the DNC. Just a few of the delegates are progressive Sanders supporters despite the fact that Sanders garnered over 40 percent of the primary vote.131
While the corporate interests of the Democratic Party and the corporate media aligned, top party officials worked to coronate Clinton. For example, Clinton has held numerous off-the-record meetings with President Obama while running for the presidency.132 Since they are off the record, the press does not know what inside scoops about policy and intelligence Obama has provided to Clinton but not Sanders. Similarly, Clinton conducted a secret meeting with Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, which likely contributed to Warren endorsing her, despite the fact that she has criticized most of what Clinton stands for and has to date been most ideologically aligned with Sanders.133 Other Democratic Party officials were publicly outspoken in their attacks on Sanders. Former Congressman Barney Frank attempted to discredit Sanders by implying that he is only helping the GOP retake the White House.134 House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California) attacked Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposals.135 Other Democratic Party officials claimed that any voter who opposes Clinton only does so because they are sexist. For example, Madeleine Albright insured her supporters that, “[t]here’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”136 One wonders if there is also a special place in hell for Albright, who, as Secretary of State under President Bill Clinton, stated in an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes regarding US-backed sanctions that led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, “. . . we think the price is worth it.”137 When suggesting women ought support a strong female candidate, perhaps Albright could have been referring to an actually progressive female candidate, one the corporate media has largely ignored, Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate for president.
Lastly, at Clinton’s aid, the corporate press excused the party and state crimes against democracy perpetrated in the Democratic primary. The Democratic Party has used a slew of rules to curtail success by the Sanders campaign, attempting to exclude him from primary ballots in Washington, DC, ignoring party insiders’ and Sanders supporters’ demands for a recount at the Nevada convention, and suspending Sanders’s access to the party database.138 In New York, some citizens were forbidden to vote in the primary because they did not change their party affiliation to the Democratic Party before the October deadline, a full six months before the primary. However, even for those who had been registered Democrats well in advance, a New York judge found that voters had been purged for unknown reasons.139 The scale of voter suppression in just Brooklyn, New York is estimated at 126,000 voters.140 There are also reports that some voting sites had incomplete voter lists and that others purged entire buildings of voters.141 Nonetheless, Clinton was declared victorious in New York. She also won in Massachusetts by 1 percent of the vote, even though her husband illegally campaigned in a polling area.142 There were also issues of delegate switching in Iowa and voter suppression in Arizona as voters’ party affiliations were mysteriously changed.143 Lastly, in California, numerous voters registered as Independent reported being told by poll workers that they were not allowed to vote in the Democratic primary.144 All of these “mysterious” anomalies just happened to favor Clinton.
Despite the overwhelming evidence of party corruption, the corporate press portrayed Sanders supporters as delusional. In fact, Charles P. Pierce, writing for Esquire, proclaimed, “If anybody thinks that, somehow, [Sanders] is having the nomination ‘stolen’ from him, they are idiots. And, no, I don’t want to talk about it.”145 Establishment liberals like Krugman of the New York Times called Sanders’s supporters delusional for continuing the race.146 The New York Times and US News & World Report ran headlines that stated “Bernie Sanders Should Drop Out Now” and “Bernie’s Dropout is Hillary’s Move.”147 However, Krugman and other corporate media shills seem unaware that Sanders supporters believe the system is rigged and want to change it, not respect it and operate within it.
In Nevada, the corporate press lambasted Sanders supporters for the problems with the election, rather than criticizing the Democratic Party. In May 2016, Sanders supporters protested that the Nevada State Democratic Party had ignored attendees and had changed the state convention rules to undermine the vote count, which had favored Sanders.148 The ruckus caused the convention to close early. Corporate media and the Democratic Party made unsubstantiated and disproven claims that there was violence at the convention, including a chair being thrown.149 However, no chairs were actually thrown. In fact, the journalist who originally reported the story, Jon Ralston of PBS, was fired for falsifying the story.150 Ralston is a major contributor to corporate news outlets such as MSNBC and Fox News. Thus, the corporate media and Democratic Party leaders treated the falsified story as fact and then denounced Sanders and his supporters. They cited dubious, anonymous aggressive texts and phone calls that Nevada party leaders received. Sanders appropriately released a statement that condemned those infractions. However, the corporate press and then-DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz chided the apology as insufficient.151 Comparably, the Washington Post spread fear among Democrats about Sanders’s supporters by claiming that his letter denouncing violence read like “an open threat to the Democratic establishment.”152 Yet the corporate media coverage ignored that the real culprit behind the Nevada convention’s disintegration was the DNC, who hijacked democracy by falsifying election results. Furthermore, the only candidate who had a supporter arrested for violence was actually Clinton. Actor Wendell Pierce, a Clinton supporter, reportedly assaulted a female Sanders supporter.153
Since 2015, the corporate media has acted to coronate Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee. This is a sheer abuse of the power of the media, but not shocking given the overlapping interests of the Clintons, the Democratic Party establishment, and corporate America, which includes many in the corporate press. It is difficult to find an equally egregious example of where the corporate media not only ignored but justified a massive political party suppression of one candidate. As of June 2016, the corporate press pointed to the votes favoring Clinton to argue that the Democratic Party system is not rigged against Sanders. However, this in itself is a piece of propaganda. 154 It ignores that a citizen’s vote is as valuable as the information behind it. With so many voters being misinformed by a corporate media system which denounced Sanders while it coronated Clinton, it is not a surprise that Clinton managed to accumulate more votes. The only surprise is that these propagandists can call themselves journalists.
The 2016 election cycle demonstrated that the corporate media peddling of Junk Food News and News Abuse has continued into the digital age. In fact, as this chapter goes to publication, a Harvard study by Thomas Patterson, Harvard’s Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, in conjunction with the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, drew many of the same conclusions as Project Censored regarding unequal and biased coverage during the 2016 primary season.155 However, the palpable voter anger illustrated an acute awareness about the negative impact of corporate media on society. While the millennial generation appears to have some grasp on the problematic nature of the US democratic system, it will take years and multiple election cycles to determine whether or not the millennials will begin the steps to repair that system.
Carl Jensen and his successors created a service-learning program in Project Censored that has left an indelible mark on generations of educators, students, activists, and citizens. It has taught them that these abuses not only exist, but also that they have the power, tools, and resources to stop and/or undermine them. This seems to ring true in contemporary youth-dominated movements such as Democracy Spring, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQI Rights, Fight for $15, Occupy, Youth Climate Movement, DREAMers, and more. Project Censored, with its many supporters and partners, has continued Jensen’s legacy of building awareness and cultivating civil action for equity in society by aligning itself with the youth and contemporary social justice and public education movements. Among the best ways the Project believes it is possible to promote democracy in action is through critical media literacy education, perhaps the strongest means for fighting against censorship and propaganda in their numerous guises while supporting a truly independent and free press.
NOLAN HIGDON is a professor of English and Latin American and US history in the San Francisco Bay Area. His academic work focuses on nationalism, propaganda, and critical media literacy education. He sits on the board of the Media Freedom Foundation and is the originating coordinator for the Global Critical Media Literacy Project. He has contributed chapters to numerous Project Censored volumes as well as Stephen Lendman’s Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III (2014). He has published articles on media and propaganda including “Disinfo Wars: Alex Jones’ War on Your Mind” (2013), “Millennial Media Revolution” (2014), and “Justice For Sale” (2015). He has been a guest on national radio and television programs and is a frequent guest cohost for The Project Censored Radio Show.
MICKEY HUFF is director of Project Censored and professor of Social Science and History at Diablo Valley College, where he cochairs the History Department. His more complete bio is at the end of this volume.
Notes
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Tom Boggioni, “Filmmakers Cry ‘Censorship’ after Robert DeNiro Boots Anti-Vaxx Movie from Film Festival,” Raw Story, March 27, 2016, accessed May 16, 2016, https://www.rawstory.com/2016/03/filmmakers-cry-censorship-after-robert-deniro-boots-anti-vaxx-movie-fromfilm-festival/.
Sam Stanton and Diana Lambert, “UC Davis Spent Thousands to Scrub Pepper-Spray References from Internet,” Sacramento Bee, April 13, 2016, accessed May 16, 2016, http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article71659992.html.
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Zach Cartwright, “Amy Goodman Blasts CNN.”
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David Rothschild, “Understanding How Polls Affect Voters,” Huffington Post, October 26, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/david-rothschild/understanding-how-polls-affectvoters_b_2009034.html.
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Hillary Hanson, “Hillary Clinton Accused of Using Static Noise to Conceal Fundraising Speech,” Huffington Post, April 9, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillaryclintonstatic-noise-speech_us_570930dae4b0836057a16748.
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Lee Fang, “Hillary Clinton Paid by Jeb Bush’s Education Company,” Intercept, May 18, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/05/18/hillary-clinton-paid-jeb-bushs-education-company/.
Dean Baker, “Washington Post Won’t Let Journalistic Integrity Stand in the Way of Scaring You Away from Sanders,” Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, October 1, 2015, http://fair.org/home/washington-post-wont-let-journalistic-integrity-stand-in-the-way-of-scaring-you-awayfrom-sanders/.
Adam Johnson, “Washington Post Ran 16 Negative Stories on Bernie Sanders.”
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Dean Baker, “NYT Invents Left-Leaning Economists to Attack Bernie Sanders,” Beat the Press (blog) at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, February 16, 2016, http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/nyt-invents-left-leaning-economists-to-attack-bernie-sanders.
Kevin Liptak, “Clinton and Obama Have Another Secret Lunch,” CNN, December 7, 2015, accessed May 16, 2016, www.cnn.com/2015/12/07/politics/obama-hillary-clinton-lunch/.
Tim Hains, “Chaos at Nevada Democratic Convention; State Party Chair Flees Building as Sanders Supporters Demand Recount,” RealClearPolitics, May 15, 2016, accessed May 16, 2016, www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/05/15/chaos_at_nevada_democratic_convention_dnc_leaders_flee_building_as_sanders_supporters_demand_recount.html.
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