on the sheer scale of
Trump or Sanders. In the
UK 2017 General Election
campaign, Theresa May
was often pictured up
close, surrounded by a
small group of activists
and hand-picked journal-
ists, whilst Jeremy Corbyn
was on display at football
stadiums, meeting with
grime artists, and filling the
banks of the Tyne.
tal media. Sanders had the
support of left-wing sites like
Think Progress and The Young
Turks, Corbyn was backed by
the likes of Evolve Politics and
The Canary, whilst Trump had
the backing of “alt right” out-
lets such as Breitbart and Info
Wars. Reddit became a hotbed
for echo-chambers through
subreddits like r/The_Donald, r/
JC4PM, and r/
SandersForPresident allowing
confirmation bias to generate
blind unquestioning support
for their idolised politicians.
One the biggest mistakes that
establishment media made
was to write these people off
as unelectable. The passion
that they inspired should have
been taken note of, rather than
simply dismissed. What very
few pundits failed to realise
was that their sneering and
condescension only added to
the cult of personality, only
strengthened their resolve to
fight back against the estab-
lishment, and fed the underdog
narrative that fuelled all of
these campaigns.
Unlike Sanders and Corbyn,
Trump managed to manipulate
media coverage into giving him
billions of dollars in free adver-
tising, the constant stream of
scandals and leaks kept Trump
at the very forefront of the
news, at the heart of daily out-
rage which only served to rein-
force his position as the outsid-
er and anti-establishment can-
didate.
Sanders and Corbyn in particu-
lar, were fighting a mainstream
media hostile to their more so-
cialist ideals, whose policies
were an existential threat to
the corporate owners that have
come to dominate news and
media. They were a threat to
the very nature of the corpo-
rate owned media that domi-
nated the news cycle and, like
Trump, they were buoyed by al-
ternative and independent digi-
These three are not the only
43