If The Clash Released An Album Today, It Might Be Called Sandernista

It seems increasingly fashionable in liberal circles to lament the treatment of Bernie Sanders by the media. The general script is that the "mainstream media" (where have I heard that pejorative before?) ignores both the large crowds he draws and the serious issues he talks about in favor of Donald Trump and - especially- Hilary Clinton. Even if you agree with his views and share the (equally laudable) desire to have serious issues widely discussed, there's a worrisome streak of naïveté within the crusade for Sanders. 

It has nothing to do with whether he's "electable" and everything to do with misunderstanding how mass media works just as thoroughly as the most ardent FoxNews zealot does. The "mainstream media" in America, of which FoxNews is as much a part as NBC or the New York Times, isn't liberal or conservative - it's commercial the same way a Marvel comics movie is commercial. 

Like most commercially-minded movies, the media isn't particularly well-suited to handle serious issues and deep thoughts. Where it excels is plot and external conflict. Consequently, politics is inevitably packaged in terms of conflict - winners and losers or protagonists and antagonists. Even when reporters and pundits purport to talk about serious issues, it's in reductive terms and typically in hindsight - as we saw eight years ago with the sparring between Clinton and Obama about whether going to war in Iraq was a mistake and as we see this year with Jeb Bush about whether the Iraq war was a mistake. 

Those who believe that Senator Sanders' campaign should get more coverage are probably right, but in the effort to spread that view it's essential to keep in mind that the reasons why he isn't getting it are far less about his stance on issues (or even his chances of winning an election) than they are about Clinton and Trump being far more entertaining and thus easier to package for the nightly news. Failure to understand that risks sounding an awful lot like the people on "the other side" that we tell ourselves we're smarter than, and we wouldn't want that.