CGTN America
CCTV America’s Anand Naidoo interviewed Cenk Uygur, founder and CEO of The Young Turks, a popular online news show as part of a panel about the U.S. media’s role in the presidential elections. Naidoo asked him one more question about what election issues the mainstream media aren’t adequately covering. Here’s his response.
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“No. 1 is the popular revolt that’s going on in the country. The media wants to close its eyes to it and pretend that it’s not happening. I mean look at what happened, Donald Trump, a guy who’s never been in politics, beat 16 other Republican politicians and all the media screamed: ‘He’s never going to win, He’s never going to win’, and they were all wrong,” Uygur said.
At the same time, they’re also under-covering Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders, he added.
“You have Bernie Sanders who, every poll shows is doing better than Hillary Clinton in the general election against Republicans, and he had a 60-point deficit about a year ago because he has no name recognition, and he made all of that up and challenged Hillary Clinton in almost one… Obviously at this point his chances are lower but the fact that a guy like Bernie Sanders can come close to beating the most powerful name in Democratic politics of my lifetime, is an amazing phenomenon,” Uygur said.
“Yet, when you look at the media, they go: Oh Trump said this and that’s why he’s popular… Meanwhile they’re missing the whole story. There is a popular revolt going on on the right and the left in the country, but the revolt is against the system and the mainstream media, the corporate media, is part of that system.”
Naidoo followed up by asking which organizations do a good job. Uygur said his company is one, as is the Intercept. But that the fundamental underlying problem of the mainstream media has not been addressed.
“The underlying problem is that the media is incentivized, they have a financial incentive to make sure the system keeps is going exactly as it is. So they have a very powerful force pulling in favor of the status quo,” Uygur said.
“For example in this election alone, they’re going to have $4.4 billion in television advertising, that comes because of the corruption in the system where private interests and corporations can give unlimited money to politicians who then spend it in TV. Since all the money is being funneled back into TV, of course everyone on TV is telling you: Oh the system is great! Don’t change it at all!”
