By Glynn Wilson –

Defying the odds and the oddsmakers in the mainstream media, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is still alive in the race for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, and one of the reasons his campaign resonates with so many people is because the traditional press in America would rather focus on the conflict between him and his primary opponent Hillary Clinton than “real issues.”

While his democratic socialist campaign has stoked support for the “shrinking middle class” and “rising wealth inequality in America,” the press is still focused on the so-called “horse race.”

From his campaign in Santa Barbara, Calif., Sanders went on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and called out The New York Times, a paper that has long been percieved as liberal but in realilty is and always has been mainstream and establishment.

“The New York Times, I’ll tell you. I have a real problem with The New York Times,” Sanders said, “which from day one has been trying to be very dismissive of our campaign and has been very negative about our campaign.”

The Times recently interview people on the street in California slamming Sanders as a “socialist” who “can’t win.” (Link not provided because The Times content is now hidden behind a pay wall).

Sanders countered that “You can go out and you can talk to millions of people and you get any response that you want.”

The New York Times, he said, “goes around and talks to a handful of people, does a front-page story, that is a problem with The New York Times and not for my campaign.”

“Our campaign is about defeating Secretary Clinton on the real issues,” he said. “I want to break up the big banks, she doesn’t. I want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, she wants $12 an hour. I voted against the war in Iraq, she voted for the war in Iraq. I believe we should ban fracking, she does not. I believe we should have a tax on carbon and deal aggressively with climate change, that is not her position. Those are some of the issues that I am campaigning on.”

Sanders also argued that “in order for the Democrats to win” against Trump in November, “they’re going to have to address the needs of working people, standing up to Wall Street, standing up to the greed of corporate America, even now and then standing up to the media.”

When pressed by Chuck Todd to weigh in on the FBI investigation of Clinton’s email practices while Secretary of State, Sanders punted the issue down the road.

“I think the American people are tired of that type of politics,” he said. “I think the media and the candidates have got to talk about why the middle class is in decline and why we have massive levels of income and wealth inequality. Those have been talking about. And those are the issues I focus on.”

“I just gave an hour long speech here in Santa Barbara,” Sanders continued, “and it wasn’t about emails, it was about the future of the middle class and some of the fundamental problems that they’re facing.”

Watch the full “Meet the Press” interview video here:

Glynn Wilson, author of Jump On The Bus and editor and publisher of the independent New American Journal, is a veteran newspaper reporter, magazine writer and editorial columnist with more than three decades of experience covering public affairs and science for traditional news outlets such as The Nation, The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News and UPI.