Bernie Sanders Is Quietly Building a Digital Media Empire

By
Gabriel Debenedetti
April 22, 2018 9:05 pm

Excerpts:

Kenneth Pennington, a former Senate staffer who later became the presidential campaign’s digital director, recalled Sanders’s refrain from long before he ramped up the current operation: “‘What we are doing is what the news media should be doing. Our goal is to create the biggest network possible for distributing information about public policy.’”

Sanders’s splashiest offerings are the spare 30-minute interviews with figures like Nye, Al Gore, and Bill de Blasio conducted in a small Senate studio. But the bulk of his programming are the short, tightly produced, and highly shareable videos that cover everything from Trump administration greed and lessons to learn from Canada’s health-care scheme to explainers from his staff (“John Bolton Should Scare Everyone,” says his foreign policy adviser in one recent offering) and real people’s straight-to-camera testimonials about their experiences with health care or tax systems. Only around one-quarter of the videos feature Sanders himself, though each is branded with his name.

“Because people turn on the television, and they’re working longer hours for lower wages, they don’t have health care, their kids can’t afford to go to college, and they’re watching TV: ‘Hey! What about me? You know, I don’t care that Trump fired somebody else today, what about my life or my kids’ lives?’ So what we do, is we look at media in a different sense, we try to figure out what are the issues that impact ordinary people, and how can we provide information to them?”

“Most comms staffers work to get their boss in the news. We were working to beat the news media at their own game,” Pennington explains. “Now the office is hyperfocused on that. Even more so than when I worked there. Bernie Sanders isn’t going to pass a lot of legislation under a Trump presidency. But he can be useful by spreading the message online. That’s the logic.”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/bernie-sanders-is-quietly-building-a-digital-media-empire.html