Bernie Sanders has only received minimal coverage from corporate-owned media outlets during the Democratic presidential primary, and even when Sanders’ policies and victories are reported, large groups of his supporters are left out of the discussion and rendered invisible.

This first started with the #BernieBro narrative, which asserts that a majority of Sanders’ supporters are young “Bros” who politically “mansplain” and dislike Clinton because they are sexist. This, of course, ignores the fact that a significant majority of women under thirty support Sanders.

Additionally, the racial and ethnic identities of Sanders supporters are consistently “whitewashed” across the same news outlets. Most of Sanders’ state victories in the northeast, midwest and western parts of the U.S. are explained in same way: they are “mostly white” states. This media narrative further negates Sanders’ victories by rendering invisible and invalidating the the political participation of people of color and/or indigenous groups in Alaska and Hawai’i. This, again, ignores polls like the one showing Sanders leading by a wide margin among young voters identifying as African American or Latino.

Individuals on twitter and facebook did push back against the media narrative with insightful and sometimes snarky posts, hashtagged #NotABernieBro and #BernieMadeMeWhite, but these tweets along with the data collected from polls did not seem to substantially alter the dominant, homogenizing media narrative.

Although we can only speculate as to the motives behind invisibility, they reveal the interplay between political and corporate bias. Corporate media, even “liberal” cable channels like MSNBC, favor the political center, an ideological center that might be open to “change,” as was the case with Barack Obama, but change that does not disrupt or fundamentally alter the status quo, as is Bernie Sanders’ goal. And when diverse groups of people recognize and organize around the intersectionalities of oppression by forming a “broad coalition” for a “political revolution,” as Sanders calls for, it challenges the status quo not only in terms of politics, but also in terms of holding media accountable for how their corporate ownership model influences reporting on politics as well as issues of the environment, labor, police brutality, austerity budgets in education etc.

Even though corporate media visibility is not the path to revolution, it is an unfortunately necessary part of strengthening and legitimizing alternative discourses that work toward changing the political, social, and economic status quo as well as sowing the seeds for a Sanders-style revolution.