Amid herculean competition, Saturday, February 22, 2020 will probably go down in history as one of the strangest and most embarrassing dates in the history of cable news. While the symptoms of a full-blown media crackup have undoubtedly been festering for weeks, Bernie Sanders’s overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses turned out to be the proverbial levee-breaking moment, especially for the talking heads who populate what is supposedly America’s liberal cable network.
In a medium not exactly renowned for offering wisdom or insight, MSNBC’s marathon coverage felt like a broadcast from another dimension; a parallel reality with a peculiar metaphysics of its own. At once painful, hilarious, and downright appalling, the network’s unhinged response to Sanders’s win doubled as a master class in everything wrong with cable news — from reflexive deference to the corporatist center to pathological hatred of populist candidates who refuse to accede to the arbitrary rules set down by elite politicians and media executives.
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