Bernie Sanders is officially catching fire. After delivering two strong debate performances, the 74-year-old Senator dominated nearly every online poll that asked viewers to choose a winner of the second Democratic contest. He now holds a commanding lead over Hillary Clinton in the key state of New Hampshire and continues to gain momentum in Iowa. Most recently, Sanders won the readers' poll for TIME Person of the Year by a landslide and scored major endorsements by UFC fighter Ronda Rousey and rapper-activist Killer Mike. This week, Sanders is on target to shatter his most monumental record to date: Hitting two million individual, small-dollar contributions, more than any other presidential candidate in U.S. history.
However, you wouldn't know that Sanders is making history if you turned on the television. Despite the Senator's latest accomplishments, he still struggles to garner any meaningful attention from the mainstream media. ABC World News Tonight, for example, has allocated a mere 20 seconds to covering the Sanders campaign, while spending over 80 minutes talking about Donald Trump. Similarly, CBS set aside just six minutes to covering Sanders and NBC Nightly News spent less than three.
As Trump storms his way through the primaries, Sanders, by contrast, tiptoes. Though the Senator continues to attract massive crowds across the country, he does so quietly, without substantial coverage from the major networks. The question is, can any candidate, even one as popular as Sanders, prevail with such limited press? Or will the corporate media's obsession with Donald Trump overshadow and ultimately undermine one of the greatest political stories of our time?