NYT’s Sydney Ember is everything wrong with corporate media

When Bernie Sanders goes hard against the wealthy elite, it’s an attack on Ember’s own social class—she’s responding accordingly

The division of newsroom labor into beats is a venerable practice. They’re often fairly broad in scope—police, city hall, the legislature—but the specialty of New York Times’ Sydney Ember is oddly specific: she’s working the anti-Bernie beat.

Technically, her domain is the 2020 elections, but her major focus is undermining the campaign of the democratic socialist senator from Vermont. Her reporting on Sanders goes far beyond the implicit bias that creeps into all journalism—there’s an undercurrent of hostility that’s hard to miss.

Her recent piece on Sanders’ trip to the Iowa State Fair was perhaps the most brazen to date. The New York Times pulled a clever bait-and-switch with a seemingly positive headline—“Why Bernie Sanders Stood Out at the Iowa State Fair”—that was revealed to be ironic in the first paragraph:

Bernie Sanders examined the butter cow. He power-walked by the Ferris wheel. He gobbled a corn dog.

He spoke to almost no one.