Bernie Sanders is leading Hillary Clinton in early primary states, and he's gaining on her in national polls.
And major media outlets are starting to treat Senator Sanders seriously, but not necessarily with complete honesty.
Take for example Laura Meckler's article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week.
It was provocatively titled "
Price Tag of Bernie Sanders's Proposals: $18 Trillion."
The article starts off by dismissing Sanders's campaign as a long-shot - and then goes on to call his proposals "the largest peacetime expansion of government in modern American history."
"In all" Meckler writes, "he backs at least $18 trillion in new spending over a decade… a sum that alarms conservatives and gives even many Democrats pause."
That estimate may give conservatives and corporate democrats pause, but the whole article should give any reader who can do simple arithmetic pause.
One red flag is that the click-bait headline makes it seem like the piece is talking about a one- or maybe two-term estimate of what Bernie's budgets might look like.
Or even more extreme - that just getting his proposals off the ground would take $18 trillion.
But the reality is that we're only looking at $1.8 trillion a year under Bernie's sweeping proposals.
But that's just a little editorial sleight of hand to drive traffic to their site right?
Well, not quite.
You see, the Wall Street Journal piece cited research by Gerald Friedman - a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
And there was just one small problem with their interpretation of his research. They blatantly omitted his conclusion.
But in the age of the information, major newspapers are rightfully under more scrutiny than ever.
Professor Friedman saw the Wall Street Journal's piece and responded in the Huffington Post with "An Open Letter to the Wall Street Journal on Its Bernie Sanders Hit Piece."
He writes that the Journal wasn't completely wrong: the program would involve spending 15 trillion dollars over a decade. But they left out the key detail: that it would actually save the country a total $5 trillion over those ten years.
