A4 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAy, MARCH 7 , 2020
election 2020
ers of Sanders, who appeared on
the show last year.
“It’s important to recognize
that the alternative view repre-
sented on our show or Joe ro-
gan’s is actually the majority
view,” Ball said in an interview,
referring to “The Joe rogan Ex-
perience” podcast, which the
host — who endorsed Sanders —
says is downloaded 190 million
times each month.
Ball added, citing an NBC/Wall
Street Journal poll from last year,
that “70 percent o f Americans are
disgusted and angry with both
political establishments.”
resentment against the media
also shapes the worldview of
Sanders’s inner circle. The candi-
date’s wife, Jane o’meara Sand-
ers, is among those involved in
monitoring coverage and alert-
ing Sanders about negative treat-
ment, S hakir said. The comments
from matthews so aggrieved
Sanders that Shakir complained
to Phil Griffin, the president of
the cable news channel. The host
apologized, and, a week later, he
announced his retirement fol-
lowing a string of controversial
comments.
media watchdog is a natural
posture for the campaign’s senior
staff, s aid rabin-Havt, the deputy
campaign manager, who de-
scribed top advisers as “commu-
nicators of a progressive message
who came up native to the Inter-
net.”
He worked at media matters
for America, a liberal watchdog
group, and as a Sirius Xm radio
host. Shakir was at Think-
Progress. David Sirota, a speech-
writer for Sanders, is a former
journalist and now the cam-
paign’s most outspoken critic of
the media.
“That imbues our campaign
with a particular way of commu-
nicating,” rabin-Havt said.
It also involves devolving a
significant amount of power to
supporters, who use the Internet
to speak on behalf of the cam-
paign in a way that other medi-
ums do not allow. That transfer
of authority has been a delicate
line for the campaign to walk, as
severe missteps by supporters —
and, in a few cases, staff — have
fueled criticism of Sanders and
his movement.
Whether the campaign bends
to the criticism, or embraces its
online juggernaut, warts and all,
has become an acute question as
Sanders decides what tack to
take in slowing Biden.
“The campaign’s political proj-
ect and its communications proj-
ect are integrated,” said Sam
Seder, a former mSNBC contribu-
tor and host of “The majority
report” podcast. “Within the
Sanders campaign, sometimes
for better and sometimes for
worse, more power has been
handed out, including online, to
people who have not been heard
in our society.”
isaac.stanley-
[email protected]ing the Bern.”
“I’m counting on the live
streams to take him into the
White House,” Klein said.
fermindoza runs the show
from a makeshift control room
adjacent to the campaign’s stu-
dio. She has two cameramen in
the field with Sanders at all
times, one r esponsible for a head-
on shot — occupying the best
space on the risers, to the chagrin
of network embeds — and the
other at a different angle.
When an event ends, she texts
statistics to someone on the road
with Sanders — often Ari rabin-
Havt, his deputy campaign man-
ager.
“It’s surprising that other cam-
paigns haven’t done what we’ve
done,” rabin-Havt said. “The re-
sources we put in are tiny, and
the rewards are huge.”
And Sanders knows it. Aides
say one of the candidate’s first
questions when he exits the stage
is how many views the live
stream garnered.Going alternative
Sanders’s online influence
comes into sharpest relief when
his supporters believe his back is
against the wall.
The day after his disappoint-
ing finish on Super Tuesday, his
campaign gained a record 87.
million impressions on Twitter. A
video of his remarks on the day’s
results — in which Sanders said
his campaign was the target of
“venom that we’re seeing from
some in the corporate media” —
has been viewed more than
500, 00 0 times on facebook.
That sense, that Sanders is not
getting a fair shake from the
most powerful news organiza-
tions in the country, has driven
his supporters to new outlets
building their brands on the
same populist forces elevating
the senator.
These independent outlets
have become as central to the
campaign’s communications
strategy as is its own original
content.
“We knew that because estab-
lishment media tends to be dis-
missive toward our campaign, we
had to seek out alternative me-
dia,” said Shakir, the campaign
manager.
m any Sanders backers, for in-
stance, may not have been watch-
ing mSNBC last month when
Chris matthews likened the sena-
tor’s victory in the Nevada cau-
cuses to the Nazi takeover of
france. But they heard about the
comparison when they tuned
into “rising” with the Hill’s Krys-
tal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, figures
from the populist left and the
populist right, respectively. Ball
featured matthews in her mono-
logue about the “stages of grief”
traveled by anchors on mSNBC,
whom she portrayed as mourn-
ing Sanders’s success in Nevada.
The online news show,
launched in 2018, has become a
popular destination for support-original shows at NowThis, a
media start-up specializing in
short videos for social platforms.
She describes the introduction
of live video on facebook in 2016
as like “breaching the Hoover
Dam” in terms of online views.
When Buzzfeed got 800,000 p eo-
ple to watch a video of an explod-
ing watermelon, the company’s
CEo, Jonah Peretti, said it was
“the first time we’ve had a num-
ber comparable to live TV.”
The question was whether
medical debt or wealth inequali-
ty could gain similar traction.
Sanders was willing to bet on
it.
The live videos his campaign
produces — sometimes four of
them a day — range from boister-
ous rallies to intimate town halls.
many take on a confessional
quality, as the candidate urges
attendees to open up about their
hardships, sometimes directing
them, like a film director, to face
the camera or speak into the
microphone.
At an autumn event in Iowa,
after a voter described being
unable to visit a doctor when she
was sick, Sanders told her that
“the story that you are telling in
one form or another is being
experienced by millions and mil-
lions of people.”
By turning h is campaign into a
live show, Sanders is striving to
prove his point about common
experience to an increasingly at-
omized society, said Howie K lein,
a record executive and liberal
blogger who runs the Blue Amer-
ica PAC. The senator wants peo-
ple to know they’re not alone —
not alone in facing misfortune,
but also not alone in backing his
campaign. An on-screen graphic
recently added to the live
streams, displaying the names of
donors, shows who else is “feel-role in shaping our view of reali-
ty.”Going live
The senator had a proposition.
It was late 2017, and he had
just introduced a bill in the
Senate to set up a single-payer
health insurance program.
He wanted to have a discus-
sion about “medicare-for-all” on
live TV, so his staff approached a
major network, and Sanders got
on the phone with one of its
anchors, according to multiple
aides involved in the plans who
declined to name the person to
avoid alienating the network.
When they didn’t hear back,
the senator asked his aides i f they
could produce the show them-
selves.
That’s what they did, partner-
ing with a trio of digital outlets —
“The Young Turks,” the popular
online news show founded by
Cenk Uygur, as well as NowThis
News and the digital media firm
ATTN — to host health-care ex-
perts in the Capitol Visitor Cen-
ter’s Congressional Auditorium
in January 2018 and to stream
the conversation live.
more than a million people
tuned in, as a news release noted,
“rivaling the viewership of cable
news in primetime.”
from then on, Sanders had a
directive for his staff — to live-
stream every event. Additional
town halls that year focused on
topics ranging from inequality to
foreign policy.
When his second presidential
campaign got underway about a
year later, he began building out
the infrastructure to run his own
in-house digital media o peration.
one of Shakir’s first calls, be-
fore he was formally on the job,
was to fermindoza, who was
managing and producing liverobert Greenwald of the non-
profit Brave New films that he
couldn’t get on the Sunday news
and political talk shows, Green-
wald recalled in an interview.
The senator felt he was being
shut out of such programs as
ABC’s “This Week” and NBC’s
“meet the Press.”
So Brave New films partnered
with his office to produce weekly
Web videos, called “Sanders Un-
filtered.” The first episode was
titled “A merica’s Class Crisis.”
Davitian likened the strategy
to the development of Allied
propaganda during the Second
World War, necessary to combat
the Nazi war machine.
“It’s a tool for democratic mo-
bilization,” said Davitian, who is
still CCTV’s executive director.
“That’s why we started public-ac-
cess TV. That was the idea that
Bernie understood. In order to
build a community based on
democratic principles, it’s impor-
tant to be able to tell your own
story.”
Greenwald shied away from
calling it propaganda. Sanders,
he said, hews to standards of
truth and evidence-based argu-
ment. And while the brash demo-
cratic socialist frequently up-
braids the media, Greenwald
added, he does not do so in
personal terms.
Still, the senator’s critique of
the media has come close to
conspiracy theorizing. He has
acknowledged as much.
“I’m not trying to sell you a
conspiracy theory,” he wrote in
his 1997 autobiography. “I doubt
that michael Eisner (or rupert
murdoch or Te d Turner) decides
what specific items will be aired
on an evening news broadcast.
Still, there is a convergence. Big
money interests own the media.
The media plays an enormousphone, which channels distrust
of the political mainstream, gives
Sanders an edge as he seeks
another rebound moment for his
campaign.
I t offers a chance to encourage
new voters to turn out in upcom-
ing primaries and to amplify his
attacks on former vice president
Joe Biden.
No other Democrat exercises
the same kind of power online.
The candidates who competed in
the nominating contest’s four
early states collectively garnered
about 57 million views on face-
book live streams over the past
year.
Sanders is responsible for
54 million of them, according to
an analysis conducted by his
campaign using CrowdTangle, a
social media tracking tool.
The online machinery, de-
signed by a staff filled with
veterans of liberal news sites and
experts in online messaging, has
helped Sanders cultivate a mass
following — including in Califor-
nia, which accounts for an out-
size share of the online views
tracked by his campaign and
delivered him an important pri-
mary win this week.
“If you’re truly a grass roots
operation, you have to speak
directly to your supporters as
frequently as you can and also
solicit their input into how the
campaign should go,” said faiz
Shakir, the senator’s campaign
manager, who gained promi-
nence in the liberal movement as
a writer for the news website
ThinkProgress. “The Internet has
colored and influenced us in
every which way.”
The strategy could also posi-
tion Sanders powerfully against
President Trump, who has a vast
online following of his own and
who shares the senator’s instinct
to use the m ainstream media as a
foil.
Sanders has been honing the
technique for 40 years.
“The day after I was elected
mayor,” he said in the late 1980s,
on an episode of “Bernie Speaks
with the Community,” a public-
access television show he created
as mayor of Burlington, Vt., “I
said to some of my colleagues,
‘We can’t survive. We’re going to
have to develop our own media.’ ”
Going on-screen
outfoxing the media has been
central to the democratic social-
ist’s political program since his
first days in public life.
“When you’re a politician deal-
ing with the media, life is diffi-
cult,” Sanders wrote in “outsider
in the House,” his 1997 autobiog-
raphy. “If you’re getting screwed
by the media, you don’t have
much recourse. Who can you
complain to? They own the cam-
era. They print the news.”
His recourse during his first
mayoral bid, in 1981, was to print
his own newspaper — “a little
handout, maybe four pages, with
all of his platforms on it,” r ecalled
Linda Niedweske, who helped
run the campaign, which toppled
a Democratic incumbent and
drew the attention of the nation-
al media.
After taking over at City Hall,
Sanders gained access to the
long-running WJoY-Am morn-
ing radio show, “The mayor
Speaks,” which he renamed “The
People Speak,” according to Ver-
mont media reports at the time.
When it was taken off the air,
he turned to the screen, ap-
proaching Lauren-Glenn Davi-
tian of Chittenden Community
Te levision, which had just se-
cured funding for public-access
television in a handful of Ver-
mont communities. one of them
was Burlington.
Beginning in 1986, Sanders
starred in “Bernie Speaks with
the Community,” which aired on
Channel 15 during a boom period
for daytime talk, captured by the
rise of oprah Winfrey.
In grainy videos now archived
on CCTV’s website, Sanders in-
terviews his police chief. He sits
on a horse. He lectures middle-
school students about racism in
America. He asks punk rockers
why they wear all black.
Thirty years before former
congressman Beto o’rourke (D-
Te x.) put his dental appointment
on Instagram Live, Sanders effec-
tively turned the cameras on his
work as a municipal manager,
even as he warned about the
pernicious effect of TV. “Televi-
sion is the major drug problem in
America today,” he said in one
episode, asking, “Where are the
stories talking about what money
and greed and vulgarity do to
us?”
The logic at the time was that
if you don’t like it, hijack it or
create an alternative. And that
has remained his aim ever since.
In 2009, he complained to
sanders from a
Using media as a foil, Sanders takes his own show on the road
SALWAN GEORGES/THE WASHINGTON POST
sen. Bernie sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during a canvass stop Feb. 2 8 in aiken, s.C. every public appearance made by the candidate is streamed live on social media.MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
as the video director for the sanders campaign, Mia Fermindoza, 28, has two cameramen in the field
with the candidate at all times and texts statistics to her colleagues on the trail after events end.