Faiz Shakir had seen enough. As summer turned to fall, and the 2020 Democratic presidential race entered the stretch run before the first caucuses and primaries, Shakir, who manages Bernie Sanders’s campaign, approached MSNBC president Phil Griffin to discuss his concerns with the network’s treatment of the Vermont senator’s second White House bid. “We watched a ton of terrible coverage occurring and we thought we’d at least try to address it,” he recalled.

For months, the campaign bristled at slights from MSNBC’s stable of hosts and commentators. Jason Johnson, an MSNBC contributor, predicted in January 2019 that Sanders would drop out by August, and network analyst Mimi Rocah said in July that Sanders made her “skin crawl.” On-screen graphics have omitted Sanders and misrepresented his poll numbers, a trend that inspired a sendup from the Onion.

“It’s been a struggle to change the tone and the tenor of the coverage that we receive,” Shakir said in an interview. “They’ve been among the last to acknowledge that Bernie Sanders’s path to the nomination is real, and even when it’s become real, they frequently discount it.” (A study from progressive magazine In These Times buttresses Shakir’s critique). Sanders also attended the off-the-record discussion with Griffin; an MSNBC spokesperson said the network has hosted similar meetings with other Democratic candidates. Shakir said the 30 Rock chat was “open” and “cordial,” but now, months later, he’s “not sure it really changed anything.”

Sanders has long contended that the agenda of “corporate media” doesn’t necessarily reflect the people’s needs, and his 2020 campaign has doubled as a rolling media criticism shop. On Twitter, Sanders’s speechwriter David Sirota, a veteran reporter, has become a one-man rapid-response machine; last week, he chided a New York Times reporter for downplaying Sanders’s victory in the New Hampshire primary. Several key campaign figures hail from the media’s left flank: deputy campaign manager Ari Rabin-Havt (Media Matters), national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray (The Intercept), and Shakir (ThinkProgress). Sanders himself has suggested that the Washington Post “doesn’t write particularly good articles about” him because of his efforts to raise the minimum wage at Amazon, the company founded by the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. He’s also railed against networks taking Big Pharma ads while on the debate stage.

Entering Wednesday’s debate in Las Vegas, which will be cohosted by MSNBC and NBC News, the ongoing tension between the titular liberal cable news network and the current Democratic front-runner has only intensified, and appears symptomatic of generational and ideological rifts within the party. It is at once a test of both MSNBC’s influence over the process and Sanders’s ability to withstand establishment resistance. Shakir said unflattering coverage on MSNBC has been “actively damaging” to the campaign. “The constant diminishment of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC,” he added, “hurts his case for electability.”

Sanders’s legion of very online supporters are quick to share clips and gripes after any perceived slight against Sanders. The anti-Bernie highlight reel grew in recent weeks, with some moments verging on parody. Joy Reid hosted a body-language expert who said Sanders’s posture revealed that he was “lying” about a recent dispute with Elizabeth Warren. Chris Matthews’s appearances, meanwhile, have become appointment viewing for his anguished warnings about Sanders. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, a glum Matthews invoked the ghost of George McGovern in forecasting a wipeout for Sanders in the general election. “Bernie Sanders is not going to be president of the United States, okay?” Matthews declared. Following the most recent debate in New Hampshire, Matthews breathlessly offered another history lesson. “I have my own views of the word socialist and I’d be glad to share them…They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War,” Matthews said. “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, okay?”

While Matthews’s rant was mostly met with mockery, there was anger last week when Chuck Todd quoted a story from a conservative publication on-air that described Sanders supporters as a “digital brown-shirt brigade,” prompting a condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League. (Todd will be one of five moderators at Wednesday’s debate.) And despite his newly minted status as the party’s national front-runner, Sanders has continued to face skepticism about his viability. The real story out of New Hampshire, Lawrence O’Donnell said, was “how much ground [Sanders has] lost from four years ago,” when he won the state’s primary in a decidedly smaller field than this year. “I don’t understand how Bernie is considered a front-runner,” Todd said after Sanders’s primary win.

Sanders supporters’ frustration spilled out on-air last week when a New Hampshire voter told host Ari Melber that she backed the Vermont senator in response to the “Stop-Bernie cynicism” on MSNBC, a clip the network later tweeted out to its nearly 3 million followers. “I watch MSNBC constantly, so I heard that from a number of commentators, and it made me angry enough, so I said, ‘Okay, Bernie’s got my vote,’” she told Melber.

When we spoke Friday, Shakir was clearly frustrated by what he saw as a mix of dismissiveness and disparagement toward his candidate. He bemoaned a “double standard” in which the campaign faces relentless scrutiny over its most vocal online supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, while MSNBC pundits have impunity to knock the candidate or his base. “You can feel the disdain they have for Bernie Sanders’s supporters,” Shakir said. “It’s a condescending attitude: ‘Oh, they must not be that intelligent. They’re being deluded. They’re being conned. They’re all crazy Twitter bots.’ My view is that there’s a bit of detachment from MSNBC and the people who this campaign gets support from. It feels like they’re covering progressives from an elitist perspective.”

Shakir credited CNN for making “efforts to try and diversify their voices,” citing the network’s hire of Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of the progressive organization Justice Democrats and a veteran of the 2016 Sanders campaign. Even Fox News has been “more fair than MSNBC,” according to Shakir. “That’s saying something,” he said. “Fox is often yelling about Bernie Sanders’s socialism, but they’re still giving our campaign the opportunity to make our case in a fair manner, unlike MSNBC, which has credibility with the left and is constantly undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign.”

Still, Sanders has made his own case several times on MSNBC, sitting down with Rachel Maddow earlier in the race and appearing last week on Chris Hayes’s show. His campaign surrogates get airtime too. On the night before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders campaign cochair Nina Turner accused Michael Bloomberg of being an oligarch trying to buy his way into the election. Johnson, the MSNBC contributor, disputed Turner’s characterization as “dismissive” and “unfair.”

A spokesperson for MSNBC declined to respond to Shakir’s specific critiques, but the network has previously brushed off complaints from Sanders as just another case of a campaign working the refs for more favorable coverage. “A presidential campaign complaining about tough questions and commentary speaks for itself,” a spokesperson for MSNBC told the Daily Beast in July. “Our anchors and analysts are doing their jobs: discussing day-to-day developments that have an impact on the race.”

The Sanders team might actually find some common ground with Hillary Clinton, whose 2008 campaign had its own grievances with MSNBC. Clinton and her supporters scoffed at what they saw as unfair and sexist treatment from the network combined with its fawning coverage of Barack Obama. Former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a Clinton supporter in 2008, called MSNBC “the official network of the Obama campaign.” Matthews apologized at one point for saying Clinton was only the Democratic front-runner because “her husband messed around.” David Shuster, then a reporter for MSNBC, was suspended for saying that Chelsea Clinton “was sort of being pimped out” by the campaign, remarks that prompted Hillary Clinton to write a letter to the head of NBC News. “I would urge you to look at the pattern of behavior on your network that seems to repeatedly lead to this sort of degrading language,” Clinton wrote.

The twilight of George W. Bush‘s presidency and the ascent of Obama marked the beginning of MSNBC’s transformation into a liberal analog to Fox News. Keith Olbermann’s thunderous, Murrow-affected denunciations of Bush gave way to Matthews’s giddy embrace of Obama, ushering in a new era for a network that had previously struggled to find an identity. “This is the network that has opened its heart to change, to change and its possibilities,” Matthews said while covering Obama’s first inauguration in 2009. In 2010, MSNBC launched a marketing campaign that carried the tagline, “Lean Forward.” By 2012, the transformation was complete, with former president Bill Clinton remarking that MSNBC had “become our version of Fox.” When NBC News and MSNBC chairman Andy Lack returned to 30 Rock in 2015, there were rumblings that MSNBC would depart from some of its left-leaning opinion programming in favor of more hard news coverage, but the network—particularly its prime-time lineup, where Maddow is one of the most influential players in Democratic politics—has remained mostly a safe haven for the party faithful. It has not, however, played host to many of the leftist and progressive voices that have powered the Sanders movement and upended Democratic politics in the last four years. The party may be changing, but MSNBC has not.

MSNBC’s coverage is also a microcosm of the generational split that Sanders faces in the primary. While Sanders cleans up among young Democratic voters, the 78-year-old fares poorly among his own age cohort (which also more closely mirrors the cable news audience). Voters aged 65 and older were shaped by the Cold War, leaving many wary of the ”socialist” label that Sanders embraces, and they were scarred by McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972. They are more contemporaries and ideological peers of Matthews, and theirs—not Sanders’s—is the predominant point of view heard among MSNBC’s center-left pundits.

“There’s a reason the network is mocked as MSDNC: because it’s long been little more than an arm of the party’s establishment apparatus,” said Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who had appeared as an MSNBC guest before becoming a staunch critic. MSNBC is “not some news organization with an anti-Sanders bias,” Greenwald said, but rather “a full-scale disinformation machine serving the primary goal of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]: destroying the Sanders campaign at any cost.”

Greenwald pointed to Hayes as an exception to his critique; Shakir also said the prime-time host “has been generally good” in his coverage of the campaign. Anand Giridharadas, a political analyst for MSNBC, has also been one of the few commentators to push back against the network’s criticism of Sanders. But identifying a Sanders sympathizer on MSNBC’s roster is reminiscent of “Where’s Waldo?” MSNBC hasn’t gone the route of CNN, which loaded up on pro-Donald Trump pundits like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski during the 2016 race and beyond because its existing stable of conservative analysts were largely critical of the Republican insurgent.

Fox faced its own standoff with a party front-runner four years ago, when Trump shunned the network for months amid the Republican presidential contest. The two sides ultimately reached a détente, and Fox had long since fallen in line behind Trump by the time he claimed the GOP nomination. That was all fairly predictable; mapping out what comes next in the Sanders-MSNBC feud is trickier. ”A world where Bernie wins the nomination and the general election is a world in which the Democratic base would be behind him, so [MSNBC] would then be in confrontation with their viewership,” said Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief for the Intercept and a former MSNBC contributor. “I would think that would force a reckoning.”

The Intercept, which Greenwald cofounded in 2014 and Grim helped turn into a scourge of the Democratic establishment, is part of a constellation of lefty publications and podcasts that flowered during the Obama years, creating a new progressive media that gave voice to Sanders and rising stars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who were otherwise ignored by mainstream outlets. That Sanders has emerged from the first two contests with the clearest path to the nomination is perhaps a sign that the network’s influence over Democratic politics has waned, a reality check similar to Fox’s realization that its own power over the GOP had been eclipsed by Trump. “That’s the question that will be answered in the coming months: how much power do they have?” Grim said. ”Liberals and conservatives have different relationships to the media. MSNBC is in a better position to drive the progressive conversation because liberals have such trust in the fourth estate, and it’s a trust that has only increased amid Donald Trump’s assault on it.”