Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) had a decent night on Tuesday, running ahead of Hillary Clinton in Missouri and narrowly losing Illinois (while losing North Carolina and Florida by wider margins).
Yet his speech was effectively censored by the three major cable news networks, who were too busy waiting for Republican frontrunner Donald Trump to speak to show Sanders in Phoenix, Arizona.
Ryan Grim of the Huffington Post noted that Hillary Clinton received similar treatment last week.
While Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC failed to carry Sanders’s address, the speech was televised on CSPAN. Sanders apparently hoped to project an image of national strength and political momentum by holding a rally in Arizona, which holds its presidential primary on Tuesday, March 22. However, Sanders has been down by at least 20% in every recent major poll (a margin he has overcome before).
Sanders rallied the large audience — “This is a yuge crowd!” — before going on to speak for a full hour. The address repeated many of the themes of Sanders’s past addresses — railing against the “top one percent,” the “rigged economy,” and so on — and was covered in some local news reports, in Arizona and beyond.
However, cable news audiences did not see Sanders speak as votes were being counted.
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