Sanders will host health-care town hall, aiming for online audience bigger than cable

By David Weigel January 11 at 9:36 AM

Excerpts:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has become one of the Democratic Party’s leading surrogates on television, is striking out with his own multimedia special — one that will run online, with no major network behind it.

“We expect that we’ll have a larger viewing audience for this live stream than we’d have if we’d run it on, say, CNN,” Sanders said in an interview. “That’s revolutionary. You can have this discussion even if the owners of the big media companies don’t want to have it.”

On the evening of Jan. 23, Sanders will host a 90-minute “national town hall” on proposals for universal Medicare, streamed by the progressive video outlets NowThis, Attn:, and the Young Turks. The idea came to him, he said, after appearing in CNN-hosted debates and forums on health care and taxes — experiences he’d mostly enjoyed — and hit a wall.

Sanders’s broadcast, as planned, has the trappings of a single-payer infomercial. The senator will host three segments: one on the current state of health care in the United States, one on the potential economic impact of universal Medicare, and one on how single-payer works in the rest of the developed world. If successful, Sanders hopes the format and distribution method could be replicated.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/01/11/sanders-will-host-health-care-town-hall-aiming-for-online-audience-bigger-than-cable/