When US Senator Bernie Sanders wanted to preview a speech about his signature health care plan, “Medicare for All,” he did not opt for a traditional interview.
Instead, he made an appearance on The 99, his Democratic presidential campaign’s in-house livestreamed show, a controlled, decidedly on-message pro-Sanders program that streams on a variety of services including Twitch, a platform primarily used by gamers.
The makeshift studio for the show is a room with a long wooden table, walls decorated with Sanders campaign signs and tchotchkes including a Sanders action figure.
Sanders sat down for an interview — with his campaign manager, Faiz Shakir.
“We are doing these livestreams, we are talking to you directly. One of the reasons is while we appreciate our friends in the elite media, they don’t often cover the issues that truly matter to working Americans,” Shakir said.
The livestream represents just one spoke in a communications network that his campaign, frustrated by the coverage he gets in traditional media, has built to exclusively promote the candidate’s worldview.
Since Sanders announced his second bid for the presidency in February, the campaign has started not just a twice-weekly livestreaming show, but also a sleekly produced podcast, Hear the Bern, hosted by his national press secretary Brihana Joy Gray.
On the first episode of the podcast, Gray described it as a “behind the scenes look at how campaigns work, how political movements grow and what motivates the man who has reintroduced big, transformative ideas into politics.”
Candidates have long sought outlets to appeal directly to supporters without a media filter, but Sanders’ efforts have taken that approach a step further, and there’s some evidence that people are watching and listening.
His campaign says that the streaming show they aired before and after the first Democratic presidential debate had more than 300,000 views.
“If you go on the premise that Bernie folks think they were boxed out of the mainstream party the last time around, I think the assumption that his folks made is they’ve just got to kind of build their own universe,” said Joel Payne, a Democratic strategist who worked on former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
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