Who was the richest person at the CNN debate? The host, Anderson Cooper. Cooper’s wealth is estimated at $100,000,000. It was Cooper’s entitled status that led him to look down on a candidate like Bernie Sanders – a candidate who professes to represent working Americans over the billionaire class.
As Reader Supported News explained:
What does yellow journalism red-baiting sound like? Cooper started with the lurking horror of every unjustifiably rich person:
“Senator Sanders. A Gallup poll says half the country would not put a socialist in the White House. You call yourself a democratic socialist. How can any kind of socialist win a general election in the United States?”
How could such a horror happen in America? That’s the question he seems to be asking. But to ask it that way, Cooper has to be deceitful and spin the Gallup poll to fit his meaning (Cooper’s spin reflects the conventional coverage of the poll at the time). The real news from the June 2015 poll was that 47% of Americans were OK with electing a “socialist” (not further defined by pollsters). That 47% is more than past polls, and those opposed to a “socialist” make up only 50%, a difference close to the margin of error. In other words, more than a year from the presidential election, Gallup finds America more or less neutral on the question of whether or not a candidate is “any kind of socialist.” For a Bernie kind of socialist, the simple answer to getting elected is to make the kind of progress in the next year that he’s made in the past six months.
Cooper’s entire handling of Bernie Sanders was colored by Cooper’s opinion that no matter what the facts show the billionaire class must be protected.
For more on this, read the article from Reader Supported News titled: “Anderson Cooper Offers No Apology for Slandering Bernie Sanders.“
