Last Friday I wrote an article that LA Progressive called “Bernie Busts Uncle Joe.”It started with a posting in “Progressive Activists” on Facebook by Stephanie Born Chabez. She asked if anyone was donating to Bernie now that Biden was in the race for the presidency. Within 47 minutes of doing so she got 103 “likes” and 71 comments, most of them saying that they had made recent contributions. Thirteen hours after posting, there were 192 likes and 124 comments. And right now (Wednesday, May 1, at 11:46) there are 216 likes and 138 comments.
Born’s question was sparked by a Tweet from Bernie’s Chief of Staff, Ari Rabin-Havt. which said Bernie raised $700,000 yesterday from 30,000+ donors! He was pointing at a letter from the Bernie campaign which requested money because of Joe Biden’s entry into the race. From this, Chabez’s posting grew. But so did the money to the Bernie campaign.
This morning I did a Google search of a quote in the article which I got from Reddit. (“also raised $700,000 yesterday”) Google found 1680 instances of that phrase in publications. Most were from Reddit or Twitter. The LA Progressive article was also found. There were no other media quotes. When I ran the phrase “Bernie Sanders raised $700,000” in Google I got the Twitter by Ari Rabin-Havt and the main Reddit piece. The LA Progressive article appeared on page 3 of the Google search. But the other major pieces Google found were about (mostly) negative Bernie things and nothing at all about the fact that 30,000 Bernieites responded to his request for donations in the face of Biden’s entry into the race.
That is the central concern. With all these people responding within a day of Bernie’s request for money, why wasn’t this worthy of a single article in the media? The only one I could find was the one that I did for LA Progressive. And believe me, I looked hard.
The biggest story for the media was the fact that Biden raised $6.3 on his first day of fundraising. Of course, Biden’s money came from a much smaller group than Bernie’s $5.9 million earlier in the campaign. Moreover, Biden had lots of time to organize that donation. Bernie, on the other hand, raised $700,000 in one day by sending out one letter to his faithful. That’s pretty indicative of the sort of support that he enjoys. As the New Republic has said, Bernie is the obvious frontrunner. Therefore, why is he being ignored? (“And yet, Bernie Sanders is being treated as something of an afterthought, as the national press and Beltway pundits hop from one shiny object to the next.”)
The New Republic isn’t the only one to point this out. But I am happy to do so and point out that Bernie raised a lot of money in a single day and no one in the media (except LA Progressive and yours truly, plus a lot of tweets and Reddit postings), pointed this out.
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