A lot of people won’t like this diary. But I’m not here to kiss everybody’s ass. This is just my observation:

Not satisfied with effective control of the Dkos Rec List, the Sanders crowd has deployed a powerful tactic to get the Daily Kos Front Page to acquiesce to their agenda. If I had a name for it, I would call it the guilt-and-conquer tactic. It’s a tactic oft used on the right. Fox News is notorious for employing this tactic. 

Here’s how it works: 

So basically we all know that Fox News is one of the most biased ‘news’ entities out there. They are essentially an arm of the GOP... just about everyone knows that. To deflect attention from their obvious bias and to win sympathy for their Republican agenda, Fox News frequently employs the guilt-and-conquer tactic against their competitors in the media.

Fox News does this by railing constantly against ‘liberal bias’ in the mainstream media (when no such thing exists). The mainstream media entities, who are ever so afraid of the liberal bias label, then go out of their way to appear ‘fair and balanced’ which basically means giving in to the right and doing whatever they want. The overall result is a right leaning media. 

The Guilt-and-Conquer Tactic on Dkos

I see a similar pattern developing here at Daily Kos. Consider the Rec List to be Fox News — a liberal Fox News for Bernie — and the Daily Kos Front Page is more like the mainstream media. There’s been a consistent drumbeat from Sanders supporters (who are deeply biased in favor of their candidate obviously) about what they perceive as bias (for Hillary) on the Dkos Front Page even where it doesn’t exist at all.

The result is that Dkos front-pagers have been very shy recently (after been bullied by the Sanders crowd) about posting anything that might be considered too pro-Hillary while at the same time have been increasingly posting pro-Bernie articles to appear ‘fair and balanced’ to the Sanders crowd. In fact, one of my favorite front pagers, who I used to rely on for informative posts on the primary, has essentially stopped posting anything pro Hillary after been attacked by a Sanderista for been a ‘Hillary partisan’. 

So just as Fox News has managed to nudge the mainstream media rightward, the influential Sanders crowd on Dkos is trying to nudge all of Dkos into the Sanders camp. 

Even Kos, the owner of Daily Kos, has to walk on egg shells nowadays when talking about Bernie after the way the Sanders mob came after him when he wrote that Hill article they didn’t like. That’s how powerful the Sanders crowd has become on this site. Cheers to the guilt-and-conquer tactic!