Sanders For President, a subreddit dedicated to supporting Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, has become the latest community on the platform to ban all content from news network CNN.
In a recent post, Sanders For President moderator Kevin Moore announced that all CNN content will be removed from the community for the foreseeable future because CNN “have abandoned their journalistic integrity.”
Moore specifically points to CNN’s coverage of Sanders before and during the seventh 2020 Democratic presidential debate as reasons for banning CNN content from the Sanders For President subreddit:
“All of their top-line stories have been unsubstantiated “hit job” style articles against the senator. This situation came to head last night when CNN hosted a Democratic primary debate. CNN’s debate has been criticized across the entire ideological spectrum of media today because their moderators spent the entire debate asking slanted questions obviously designed to weaken Americans’ confidence in Senator Sanders, the current frontrunner in the first three primary states.”
On Monday, CNN posted a story claiming that Sanders had told presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren that he did not believe a woman could win the presidency during a private December 2018 meeting. Sanders has denied the claims and publicly stated in 1988: “In my view, a woman could be elected president of the United States.”
Sanders also endorsed Hilary Clinton for president in 2016 and said she “will make an outstanding president.”
During Wednesday’s debate, CNN came under fire when one of its debate moderators asserted that Sanders had told Warren “a woman could not win the election” after Sanders had told the moderator he didn’t say it.
CNN has also been criticized for the release of hot mic footage of a post-debate exchange where Warren accuses Sanders of calling her a liar on national TV.
Additionally, CNN was blasted last October when it was accused of manipulating footage of Sanders to make him look unwell while he was recovering from a heart attack.
This isn’t the first time CNN’s reporting has resulted in it being banned from subreddits. In 2017, the news network infamously tracked down and threatened to dox an anonymous Reddit user after he posted a wrestling meme featuring President Trump and CNN. In response, several popular subreddits including the Conspiracy, Wholesome Comics, and Wholesome Memes subreddits banned all direct links to CNN websites.
