If you feel like you haven't seen much, or any news, about Bernie Sanders and the democratic primary race, it's not just in your head.
Over the weekend, the Tyndall Report revealed that mainstream nightly news shows, through the entirety of this year of 2015, have spent only 10 minutes of total coverage on Bernie Sanders, as opposed to 234 minutes of total coverage of Donald Trump.
The weird thing is, that polls show Bernie Sanders easily beats every Republican candidate in a general election, and by more than Hillary Clinton would.
But the media refuses to cover Senator Sanders, and even Hillary Clinton has largely dropped out of the headlines since the Benghazi emails were put to rest.
It could be because Bernie wants to raise the taxes of millionaire network executives, or because Bernie is raising questions about how well we're being served by media consolidation and the rise of "infotainment" and the death of real "news".
At least that's what it's starting to look like. Even over at the "progressive bastion" of the mainstream media, MSNBC, Jose Diaz-Balart pushed a very recent NBC News poll that found terrorism to be the most important issue to Americans.
In fact, some in the defense-contractor-funded media like NPR are actually rationalizing not covering Bernie Sanders by lying and saying that Bernie isn't talking about ISIL, which the corporate media has deemed the most important issue to Americans.
Earlier today, David Greene spoke to Scott Horsley on NPR's Morning Edition about
Clinton's strategy towards ISIL, and they took about two sentences to dismiss Bernie Sanders.
But they're wrong on both counts.
First, Bernie Sanders does have a plan, a detailed plan involving pulling together a coalition of Middle Eastern states to combat ISIS.
In fact, he laid it out during a campaign rally just YESTERDAY, one day BEFORE Hillary Clinton announced her plan, a pesky fact that Greene and Horsley completely left out.
And second, this is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy, the media loves terror porn; keeping people afraid is profitable.
However, both common sense, and simple analysis, show that what really keeps most Americans up at night is money, or the lack of it.
For the first time in the lifetime of many Americans, the Middle Class now makes up less than half of the US population.
At the same time, working people are working longer and longer hours, because for 35 years Reaganomics has transferred their wealth to the richest Americans.
We're losing an average of 14 factories, and all of their jobs, EVERY DAY thanks to our insane trade policies.
All those factories closing down has led to an increase in crime and drug abuse across former industrial centers like Detroit and Baltimore, and across huge swaths of the Deep South, Appalachia, and beyond.
As Bernie Sanders reveals, the real rate of YOUTH unemployment alone in the United States is at depression levels.
That's right, more than half of black youth and over a third of both Hispanic and white youths in America were unemployed over the past year.
So it really shouldn't come as any surprise that nearly one out of every four American families has no net worth. Or, worse, they're buried in debt. And, more than half of all Americans are one serious illness or job-loss away from disaster and homelessness.
Those are alarming statistics. But what's really problematic, is that the corporate media won't talk about it.
Which is a giant gift to the Republican Party - the corporate party.
It's time that the media start LISTENING to what people actually care about: the American middle class being eaten alive by the top 1 percent.
And then the media needs to ask the candidates what they plan to do about it.
Not just because it's the issue in the Democrats' wheelhouse, but because it's the real crisis that's tearing up America.
Thom Hartmann Program
Please, When callers make the mistake of using the word Medicaid when they mean Medicare will you ask Thom to explain that Medicare is not Medicaid. He keeps saying the same thing and confusing the public, and they are confused enough. It is important. Medicaid is not a federal program for retirees. That is Medicare.
'Ditto on the Medicare comment!
Re: oil exports in new budget
Oil companies will make oodles of money by shipping unrefined oil to other countries for processing which will be shipped back to our gas stations for sale at a higher price. We won't need all those pesky refineries and their high priced employees either. (Another industry shipped out of what is left of the good ol' USofA!) But hey, Nigeria and Venezuela already have the refining capacity sitting there ready to go.