Bernie Sanders’s campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, has accused MSNBC of employing “double standard” in its coverage of the Vermont senator, claiming in an interview published Tuesday that Fox News is “more fair” in critiquing Sanders’s progressive platform.
“That’s saying something,” Shakir told Vanity Fair. “Fox is often yelling about Bernie Sanders’s socialism, but they’re still giving our campaign the opportunity to make our case in a fair manner, unlike MSNBC, which has credibility with the left and is constantly undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign.”
He added that MSNBC regularly criticizes Sanders’s base with “disdain.”
“It’s a condescending attitude: ‘Oh, they must not be that intelligent. They’re being deluded. They’re being conned. They’re all crazy Twitter bots,’” Shakir said. “My view is that there’s a bit of detachment from MSNBC and the people who this campaign gets support from. It feels like they’re covering progressives from an elitist perspective.”
Following the Iowa caucuses earlier this month, MSNBC contributor James Carville warned that Sanders, if nominated, would fare no better than the U.K.’s Labour Party’s Jeremy Corbyn, who was crushed in a December election by Boris Johnson.
“We’re talking about people voting from jail cells, we’re talking about not having a border. . . . I don’t want the Democratic Party in the United States to be the Labour Party of the United Kingdom. And I think there’s some danger of that happening,” the former Bill Clinton strategist said. He later argued to Vox that Sanders has “never been a Democrat,” and is instead “an ideologue.”