I have not endorsed a candidate in the primaries. I have not chosen a favorite. I will vote for any Democrat who runs against Trump.
That said, I’m very concerned about the New York Times’ consistently negative coverage of Senator Bernie Sanders.
We expect the newspaper of record to be unbiased. But when it comes to Sen. Sanders, the Times goes after him in snide ways.
First, there was an article that delved into his anti-war views of thirty-five years ago. It was written by Alexander Burns and Sydney Ember and published on May 19. Its overall tone is hypercritical of Sanders for his leftist views, especially his efforts to undermine the Reagan administration’s policies towards the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
A New York Times review of Mr. Sanders’s mayoral papers — including hundreds of speeches, handwritten notes, letters, political pamphlets and domestic and foreign newspaper clippings from a period spanning nearly a decade — revealed that from his earliest days in office Mr. Sanders aimed to execute his own foreign policy, repudiating Mr. Reagan’s approach of aggressively backing anti-Communist governments and resistance forces, while going further than many Democrats in supporting socialist leaders.
Mr. Sanders’s activities during his mayoralty bring into relief the fervently anti-imperialist worldview that continues to guide him. They also underscore his combative ideological persona, which has roiled national Democratic politics as thoroughly as it upended municipal government in Burlington. As mayor, Mr. Sanders denounced decades of American foreign policy that he portrayed as guided by corporate greed, and outlined a vision of international affairs defined by disgust at military spending and sympathy for Marxist-inspired movements in the developing world…
Mr. Sanders’s deep-rooted foreign policy values have the potential to not only earn him support from voters who have grown tired of overseas wars, but also make him vulnerable to attack from rivals in both parties who are eager to depict him as too radical for the presidency.
Mr. Sanders, a Vermont senator since 2007, initially declined an interview for this article. But after it was published Friday, he requested a phone interview, during which he described his opposition to the Vietnam War and criticized an American foreign policy in the 1980s that he said had revolved around overthrowing governments and “installing puppet regimes.”
“I plead guilty to, throughout my adult, life doing everything that I can to prevent war and destruction,” he said…
In the interview Friday, Mr. Sanders called the Soviet Union an “authoritarian dictatorship” but said that stopping nuclear war was more important to him in the 1980s.
“I was going to do everything that I could to prevent a nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union,” he said.
The article paints Sanders as an ideological extremist and radical who was out of the mainstream. Imagine a mayor who is anti-war! What an outrage!
Is it fair to expect everyone to have exactly the same views over their entire life? Is it fair to judge a person today by what he said and did 35 years ago? I don’t think so. My views have evolved. Some have changed dramatically. Most people supported the war in Vietnam when it happened. I expect many (including me) now see it as a disaster. Maybe the same is true about the war in Iraq, which turned into the war in Afghanistan, which might soon become the war in Iran. Bernie Sanders opposed them all.
Presumably the Times will tear apart Biden for the votes he cast long ago and the views he espoused that he now regrets.
And the Times will do the same to every other Democratic candidate, thus assuring Trump’s re-election, since his rabid base doesn’t care what he has done or said in the past.
Most infuriating recently was the New York Times’ hit job on Sanders’ thoughtful education plan, which was co-written by veteran education journalist Dana Goldstein and Sydney Ember, who to my knowledge has no education knowledge or experience. Ember was also co-writer of the anti-Sanders’ piece on May 19.
The Sanders plan for education is incisive, intelligent, well-informed, and bold.
He proposed a tripling of funding for Title 1, the funding stream that directly affects the neediest children.
He proposed increasing the federal contribution to the cost of special education to 50%. When Congress mandated special education services for children with disabilities, it pledged to pay 40% of the costs. It has never paid more than 10-12%. If Congress were to raise its payment to 50%, it would provide immediate fiscal relief to every school district in the nation.
He made clear that his administration would prioritize desegregation.
He called for a ban on for-profit charter schools and a moratorium on charter schools, echoing the NAACP (and Black Lives Matter), until it could be determined whether they are having a negative fiscal impact on public schools and whether they meet the same standards of accountability as public schools. He noted that “billionaires like DeVos and the Waltons, together with private equity and hedge fund executives, have bankrolled their expansion and poured tens of millions into school board and other local elections with the hope of privatizing public schools.” This statement is a matter of fact, not campaign rhetoric. The millions spent by billionaires like Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, the Waltons, and hedge fund managers (DFER) to influence school board elections and referenda are real.
He committed to rethinking the national reliance on property taxes and to ensuring that all schools are equitably funded.
He promised to work with states to establish a minimum teachers’ salary of $60,000.
Every parent, every educator, every citizen should read his plan.
But consider how the New York Times reported Sanders’ visionary plan.
The article barely mentions Sanders’ historic funding proposals and focus instead on his critique of charter schools, which is a relatively small part of his plan. They write that Sanders’ support for racial integration was “overshadowed by more divisive elements of the proposal: Mr. Sanders’s plan to freeze federal funding for all new charter schools, and the link his plan made between charter schools and segregation.”
It goes on to say that “Many Democrats, most notably Barack Obama, support charters as a way to provide more options to families, especially those that are too poor to move to a higher-quality school district or pay for private school. The impact of charters on school segregation is hotly disputed in education circles, and by linking these elements, Mr. Sanders touched a nerve in a highly charged debate within the party.”
They then quote Amy Wilkins, a paid lobbyist for charter schools (“a vice president at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools and a longtime advocate in Washington for racial equity in education”), who finds the linkage of charter schools and segregation to be “galling.” She thinks that the Brown decision gave black parents the right to choose where to send their children, ignoring the fact that racist governors and senators said exactly the same thing and enacted freedom-of-choice plans that were repeatedly struck down by federal courts.
The article balances Wilkins by acknowledging that “The Sanders plan lists a number of causes of school segregation, such as inaction from the courts and federal government. It also cites data from a 2017 Associated Press investigation, which found that 17 percent of charter schools had student populations that were 99 percent nonwhite, compared with 4 percent of traditional public schools.
