Activists Launch Fight for Media Fairness for Sanders in Tight New York Primary

Operation Battle of New York

New York’s may be the most important primary of the presidential election, and local journalists and activists are responding by organizing an independent media campaign to counter biased reporting about Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

Ben Norton reports of “Operation Battle of New York,” which will publish both an English- and a Spanish-language version, at Salon:

It is the name of a new campaign launched by the editorial groups of The Indypendent and The Occupied Wall Street Journal, left-wing citizen journalist publications that have served as important voices for American social movements for more than a decade.

“We can expect corporate media to do everything it can to prop up Clinton and ignore or mischaracterize Sanders and the increasingly broad and diverse movement that supports him,” Operation Battle of New York writes in the description accompanying its Indiegogo campaign.

“But we don’t have to leave it there. Independent media can tell another story.”

The idea the activists have is to subvert, even “supplant,” mainstream media outlets in the days before the April 19 primary. They plan on creating, editing and printing 500,000 copies of a special edition, bilingual, broadsheet newspaper with the kind of compelling coverage mainstream media outlets rarely touch. And they are going to flood New York with the publication in the week before the primary.

An editorial team has already been formed, and has been working on the publication for weeks. Production began on April 7, and is only going to accelerate in the coming week.

In the first five days of their Indiegogo campaign, the group has raised approximately $8,000, with almost 200 backers. And they say this is just the beginning.

The publishers of The Battle of New York have a lot of experience in this territory. Their guerilla media campaign is based on the ones they helped lead during the Occupy movement, along with those in the 2003 protests against the Iraq War, the 2004 protests against the Republican National Convention, the 2014 People’s Climate March and today’s Black Lives Matter movement.

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—Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.