Media coverage of Bernie Sanders

The media coverage of Bernie Sanders, a U.S. Senator from Vermont, became a subject of discussion during his unsuccessful 2016 and 2020 presidential runs. His campaigns, independent observers, as well as media sources have said that the mainstream media in the United States is biased against Sanders. Others, particularly those within the mainstream media, say that coverage is unbiased or biased in his favor. The allegations of bias primarily concern the coverage of his presidential campaigns.

A study of the 2016 election found that the amount of media coverage of Sanders during 2015 exceeded his standing in the polls; it was however strongly correlated with his polling performance over the course of the whole campaign. On average, research shows that Sanders received substantially less media coverage than Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, but that the tone of his coverage was more favorable than that of any other candidate. During the 2016 election, the media provided substantially more coverage of the Republican primary than the Democratic primary, as Republican candidate Donald Trump dominated media coverage.

During the 2020 Democratic primary, Sanders, his campaign and his supporters again criticized the media for being biased. Sanders suggested that The Washington Post gave him unfair coverage because Sanders had encouraged taxing The Washington Post's owner Jeff Bezos's main company, Amazon, more heavily. The executive editor of the Washington Post rejected Sanders's suggestion, describing it as a "conspiracy theory" and stating that Bezos "allows our newsroom to operate with full independence." In the following election in 2024, Bezos did reportedly intervene by preventing the Post's Editorial Board from publishing a drafted endorsement of the then-Democratic Party nominee Kamala Harris.