Republican candidates can deflect a lot of issues during the primaries by blaming the media for their problems, especially if they also characterize the issue as a partisan attack from Democrats. Democratic voters place more trust in the media than Republican ones do, so this can be a trickier path forward for Democratic candidates.
But Hillary Clinton is fairly unique in that a high percentage of Democrats think the media is biased against her. Tonight, it was Bernie Sanders — not Clinton herself — who critiqued the media’s coverage of Clinton’s email server. Still, it was significant that his remarks got the loudest applause of anything said in the debate so far.
