Democrats in Washington have been negotiating the terms of President Joe Biden’s economic, health care, and climate bill for seven months, and most Americans have no idea what’s in it — or which popular provisions conservative Democrats are helping their corporate donors try to kill.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has laid some of the blame for that on news coverage, arguing that “the mainstream media has done an exceptionally poor job in covering what actually is in the legislation,” and asserting that, while there has been endless coverage of Capitol Hill gossip, there has been “very limited coverage as to what the provisions of the bill are and the crises for working people that they address.”

The Vermont senator’s assertions are backed up by a series of studies from Media Matters for America documenting how corporate media has often written the climate crisis out of its coverage of the legislative battle, and how that coverage has decontextualized the bill’s top-line price tag.