I was clearly wrong on the relative electability of Hillary & Bernie, but I'm voted in the primary for the candidate that better represented my views. I didn't vote for Hillary because the DNC made me do it or the media lied to me. I watched their speeches, I read their websites, I watched the debates, and I decided I'd rather have Hillary than Bernie. That's it.
It's not a giant conspiracy, there's just a lot of rank and file Democratic voters that aren't all in on Bernie's worldview. If you want to make an argument for why I should be more in on the Bernie plan than Hillary's plan I'd hear it (I guess not on HN), but stop pretending like the majority of Democratic primary voters were duped.
However, I'm surprised that you aren't offended by the DNC's corruption and dishonesty. Say what you want about Bernie -- you can't deny he attracted much new blood to the party; he was the last hope of reclaiming the lost passion of the 2008 Obama campaign. The DNC's open hostility to his candidacy was shameful. If you're trying to imply that somehow it had no effect on the primary outcome, you should share whatever you're smoking with the group.
There are a number of people advancing the 'we have no evidence' banner in this thread, which is strange because studies of electibility were commonly discussed here during the primaries.
What it comes down to is that I don't think electability polls taken before the conventions can really tell us much about how people would feel about Sanders after he started getting hammered in a general election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/11/07/do...
Most agents that are skirting the rules have some notion that they shouldn't be overtly recording their misdeeds. In other words, where there's smoke, there's often fire.
The 'one incident' wasn't just smoke, though. It was a full blown conflict-of-interest fire in and of itself.
What does that have to do with a corporate media conspiracy to elect Hillary Clinton over the obvious victor Bernie Sanders?
A number of studies have indicated that media displayed substantial bias during the primaries. That bias was directly in line with Clinton's campaign strategy, as stated in another child to the parent comment.
https://shorensteincenter.org/news-coverage-2016-presidentia...
I'm not sure what else you're looking for. More on the causation front? Studies on the effects of media coverage on candidates in political races have thoroughly discussed here and elsewhere since the election.
More on the media bias side? I'm sure you can review the DNC leak as well as other post-election frequency reviews.
There's a reason why people were outraged at the media post-election and subsequently why the 'fake news' scapegoat was trotted out as a narrative to salvage the worth of mainstream media's reputation.
Did I ever claim the media wasn't biased? Of course the media had an effect on the election, and that effect wasn't neutral. The fact that the media has systemic biases does not imply that major media organizations conspired in favor of a candidate, Hillary Clinton, who was actually considered by most to have been negatively impacted in the general election, and according to the link you posted, was covered more negatively than Bernie Sanders.
This is a giant mess conflating DNC problems with fundamental realities of news media with an unproven conspiracy theory. I have always been responding to this: "the corporate media [...] colluded to stop a once in a lifetime opportunity in Bernie Sanders to help their friend and collaborator Hillary Clinton, and so we ended up with Donald Trump." I promise you, that is not the position of the Shorenstein Center or any other academic research organization focused on journalism.
The numbers bear this out, and you're welcome to do further homework on the issue, as well as the importance of variables at play in media coverage. Sentiment analysis is not the only element of reporting coverage that matters. Here's some more analysis which shows the putative internal mechanism for the frequency of media's reporting, which is consistent with the internal stakeholder incentives. The analysis shows that there is a dramatic decoupling in reporting frequency as between Clinton and Sanders. http://decisiondata.org/news/political-media-blackouts-presi...
The finding regarding his airtime in comparison to Cruz in the Shorenstein report is damning. So is the search interest correlation decoupling between him and Hillary.
Those are hard numbers. Numbers which bear our a narrative which was raised and repeated during the primaries, and then vindicated by numerical analysis afterwards by a number of reputable sources. Additionally, when the DNC leaks did occur, they revealed that Clinton's preferred media outcome did occur, and that the DNC systemically favoured her over Sanders.
Put simply, we have the act laid bare by statistical analysis, the relationships between the actors in question mapped out by the leaks, and the incentive for the parties to act all mapped out, yet your position is that there is no evidence whatsoever that something happened.
"The problems associated with press coverage of the 2016 nominating campaign are rooted in the mismatch of journalism values and the structure of the nominating process. There is little question that the nature of the 2016 campaign—Trump’s presence, particularly—brought the mismatch into sharp relief. But the broad tendencies in press coverage of the 2016 coverage are ones that exhibit themselves every four years."
The truth is that Sanders was considered by everyone to be a long shot candidate, so he got less coverage. The coverage he did get was much more positive than the coverage of Clinton. They both got radically less coverage than Trump. So, no act laid bare by statistical analysis, just a long-standing bias in favor of covering the most famous candidates with the most celebrity status.
The relationships between candidates and reporters is totally public and was in no way revealed by any leaks. It's an obvious part of doing the job of political reporter that only people who had never closely followed a campaign were surprised by, and that was willfully misrepresented by the likes of Breitbart and Fox News as somehow nefarious. Remember, there was no corresponding RNC leak, which would of course show that reporters were talking to politicians there constantly too. There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert with the DNC to influence the outcome of the election in Hillary's favor, only that the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals (to get new information and to win the election, respectively). So, no relationships between actors mapped out.
Anyway, if there were a scheme to use frequent mentions to favor a candidate, it's clearly Trump, not Clinton. It's well documented that Trump stories drove the most clicks, which is why news outlets focused so much on him. Was there a massive conspiracy between all the Republicans, including Trump himself, who spoke to reporters every day, clearly tilted the general election in favor of Trump, and had a direct incentive to get a scandal-prone celebrity into office?
Most people who follow politics closely know that Clinton has a famously bad relationship with the media and has earned incredibly negative coverage as a result. She's very famous and so she gets covered but there is definitely no giant multi-company conspiracy to support her.
Your hypothesis has been debunked in the provided sources, as well as elsewhere.
Even when viewer intent is controlled for in models, Sanders was consistently substantially underrepresented in coverage, while Hillary was substantially over-represented. Additionally, pole results correlated poorly with coverage volume.
If you read the leaks, you will note that contrary to your statement that "There is nothing in the DNC leaks that proves reporters working in concert", there is substantial evidence that key, impactful information was provided to the Clinton campaign and that Clinton's campaign desires aligned with reporting in fact.
Clinton wanted Trump to be a frontrunner because she thought she could eviscerate him. This is contained in the leak.
That she did not, in fact, do so, doesn't indicate that there was no conformity between her campaign strategy and the media coverage in fact. Most media narratives leading up to the election indicated that Hillary was substantially ahead.
Your argument that 'the two groups were attempting to influence each other in service of their own goals' doesn't indicate that there wasn't an improper collusion. If you and I own companies, and we agree in service of our own goals to raise prices and reduce competition, in most jurisdictions we would be thrown in jail. Which is why the conversations in which these agreements happen (and they do) are not. written. down.
Indeed, the burden is on you to show how they ever lifted the tiniest finger to NOT do what we all knew they were up to from the start: coronate Clinton as heir apparent.
The fact that career democrats feel strongly about the outcome of a democratic primary is not a corporate media conspiracy. Should there be reforms to the Democrats' primary process? Yes. Is that at all relevant to the subject of this part of the thread? No.
With that point standing, the statement is opinionated but hardly tinfoil-hat. Hillary and the DNC are definitely due for a great deal of blame for our current disaster -- if they had lifted a finger to accomodate the Bernie side -- make him VP maybe, or pick someone less nasty than freaking KAINE -- they might have been able to pick up on his momentum a little. Would Bernie have beat Trump, or even won without the DNC collusion? I don't know -- but you don't either.
Further, the incredibly contingency of all of this means that we can't actually prove such vague cause and effect relationships. We can't know that the media unilaterally crushed Bernie's candidacy. Maybe if the media had covered Bernie more, it would have led to more scrutiny or some kind of gaffe that destroyed his campaign. Maybe if he had gotten one more news story he would have been reading it on his phone, slipped on a banana peel, and broken his neck. I have no idea if more coverage would have made Bernie more popular, or if the "the media is ignoring me!" narrative was actually a key engine of his campaign's growth.
Collusion means "secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others" according to Google. DNC collusion is fair—there are arguments that this is less than nefarious, but I disagree with them. Multi-corporation media conspiracy with the purpose of anointing Hillary over Bernie? Still waiting to see any evidence of that.