I have reached my tipping point on Bernie Sanders Needs to Make Inroads with African-Americans articles. This is the worst kind of vapid horse race political reporting. If you read that article and many like it, you will find no discussion of policy. The article boils down to "Sanders needs people to vote for him if he is going to win", which is a truism. Sanders is unknown nationally. He's been making amazing inroads in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and yes, those states are very white. So right now his support is primarily white, because he is campaigning in those states first. But there's nothing to say that his message won't resonate with non-white voters to the same degree. Except that about a million of these Bernie Sanders Needs to Make Inroads with minorities articles have been posted, and these articles, all of them content free, morph into a message that Sanders can't make inroads with African-Americans or Latinos, or doesn't want to, or something like that. And as far as i know, nothing can be further from the truth.

I don't presume to know for sure what issues African-Americans care about. I started to write a laundry list, from his involvement in the Civil Rights movement of the 60s and 70s, his opposition to Bill Clinton's welfare and crime "reforms" in the 90s, and through to today, when he's partnering with John Conyers on a youth jobs bill. But i don't want to presume. It would be nice if these articles actually investigated and reported on the issues that African-Americans and Latinos (and other groups) care about and compared it to Sanders' (and Hillary Clinton's) record and proposals. Anything else is just reading the poll numbers to us, and telling us nothing.

I have a degree in Broadcasting and worked a little as a print reporter - so, a few thoughts:

This is what you want to point that conservative in-law at when he's blathering on about the "Liberal news media". The biggest problem isn't bias; it's competence. -Even at FOX. They all do it to everyone on all sides.

The mass media is composed of mostly extremely intelligent people (under deadline) who collectively form a Group Mind that is very stupid. They tried to talk up the last presidential cycle as a horse race -thereby coming close to creating a reality- because "Mitt Romney is an okay guy, but offensive to his base for religious reasons and a lot of moderate positions in his closet, so this is going to go to the incumbent by default" don't sell many newspapers. I knew it all along, I suspect you did, I suspect Romney's mother did - but a horse race is a better story and that trumped accurate reporting.

I could write a book, but I'll cut short just pointing out how in the previous cycle, when Hilary display actual human emotion in talking to a woman about the state the country's in, the "liberal" media were in there for a week trying to Dean her just as hard as they tried at Fox. It's didn't work because the mass media group mind is too stupid (and consumed by the smell of blood in the water) to see that Ms. Clinton only benefits from a rare public show of actual sincerity.

I do need to find out more about Bernie - he sounds like my vote if he makes to my state in the primaries (which he won't, but hope springs...)

Thanks for the thoughts, BU. What you're saying does make sense to me.