Democratic presidential hopeful Andrew Yang continued to slam MSNBC on Sunday for treating him unfairly both during the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) presidential debates, as well as in their campaign coverage throughout the primary season.
“Americans tuned in the debate earlier this week and they saw I got called on less than any other candidate including candidates that I am polling higher than and the questions I did get had virtually nothing to do with the core ideas of my campaign,” Yang told news anchor Ana Cabrera during an appearance on “CNN Newsroom.” “And if this were an isolated incident that would be one thing, but if you go back over the last number of months, MSNBC has literally omitted me from over a dozen fundraising and polling graphics.”
Yang was the candidate who spoke the single least amount during the DNC’s fifth primary debate that was presented jointly by MSNBC and The Washington Post on Wednesday. Yang only spoke 1,301 words during the entire debate, per data compiled by FiveThirtyEight. Accordingly, he spoke 10% less than financier Tom Steyer, who received the second lowest amount of speaking time, and nearly 50% less than frontrunners former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
He also spoke for less amount of time than the other candidates, clocking in at only six minutes and 48 seconds. By contrast, Steyer spoke for eight minutes and 24 seconds, while Warren received 13 minutes and 29 seconds of speaking time, according to The New York Times.
“[It] is not about me. It’s about the 300,000 plus Americans who donated to and support my campaign and the millions of Americans who know we need to rewrite the rules of the 21st century economy to work for us,” Yang continued. “Think about those people donating $10, $20 of their hard earned money to put a candidate on the stage and then have MSNBC virtually ignore me for 32 minutes or when they tune in to MSNBC to see how we’re doing in the polls it’s like I don’t exist.”
“You can go through the records, you can see they’ve done it to me over and over again,” he added. “And I’m not the kind of guy who takes offense easily but at this point you have to call it like you see it.”
Prior to that debate, MSNBC notably excluded Yang from a graphic on where candidates were polling and another graphic previewing the debate. On Saturday, Yang went after the network for treating him unfairly.
Was asked to appear on @msnbc this weekend – and told them that I’d be happy to after they apologize on-air, discuss and include our campaign consistent with our polling, and allow surrogates from our campaign as they do other candidates’. They think we need them. We don’t.
— Andrew Yang🧢 (@AndrewYang) November 23, 2019
“Was asked to appear on [MSNBC] this weekend — and told them that I’d be happy to after they apologize on-air, discuss and include our campaign consistent with our polling, and allow surrogates from our campaign as they do other candidates,” he said. “They think we need them. We don’t.”
Cabrera, however, pressed Yang on what he believed the reason was for a left-wing network to treat him differently than other Democratic candidates.
“It’s a bit of a mystery to me,” Yang replied. “I hope that when they come clean and acknowledge that they have been suppressing and ignoring me and my campaign for months maybe they’ll actually share with us what the rationale is.”
“All I know is I’m fighting for the American people,” he continued. “I’m here in Iowa. There are — I’m going to say hundreds. I lost track — hundreds of Iowans right behind me, as you can see, who know we need to actually work on solving the problems that got [President] Donald Trump elected. I have no idea why MSNBC does not want to have this conversation.”