Supporters of Bernie Sanders have long been accustomed to the nagging feeling that the candidate they champion rarely, if ever, receives a balanced treatment in the mainstream media. Many have also grown used to hearing this impression questioned — characterized as the product of a self-imposed victim complex or a figment of the imagination.

There’s never been any dearth of anecdotal evidence of the media’s systemic bias against Sanders. When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah declared that Sanders “[makes my] skin crawl . . . [though I] can’t even identify . . . what exactly it is,” she inadvertently summed up the sentiment of generalized but virulent contempt that often characterizes the way Sanders and his campaign are discussed on the airwaves and in marquee newspapers. Though there are simply too many cases to list, examples abound of selective reporting of polls, cartoonish torquing of infographics, erasure of facts or figures favorable to Sanders, and outright lying — at the supposedly liberal-leaning MSNBC in particular.

The week of Sanders’s launch, former Hillary Clinton staffer Zerlina Maxwell (introduced by the host simply as an “MSNBC analyst”) was allowed to insist on air that Sanders hadn’t “mentioned race or gender until twenty-three minutes” into his launch speech — a claim that was entirely inaccurate. On another occasion, Chuck Todd discussed a Quinnipiac poll and claimed it showed Sanders had gone down by five points — whereas, in fact, it had shown the exact opposite. An April 29 segment on the Rachel Maddow Show used blatant cherry-picking of donor data to suggest Sanders had raised “twice as much money from male donors” as female donors — a claim that both flew in the face of the nearly 50-50 gender split among his first-quarter donors and the strong likelihood that he actually had the highest number of female donors overall.