• by March 5, 2020

Michael Bloomberg's decision yesterday to end his presidential bid and endorse Joe Biden, after spending hundreds of millions of dollars of his own money to saturate the media with campaign ads, closed one of the most dramatic periods of the 2020 presidential election.

A key moment stands out in the past few weeks of Bloomberg's collapsing campaign that highlighted his vulnerabilities as a candidate. It also showcased how media outlets outside the corporate mainstream can drive political discussions as more people rely on social networks to share information.

Benjamin Dixon, a self-described political progressive, whose media ventures include The Progressive Armywebsite and "The Benjamin Dixon Show" podcast, sent a tweet on Feb. 11 that drove the news cycle and highlighted a major blind spot in campaign coverage.

Dixon's tweet promoted his most recent podcast that discussed Bloomberg's "racist, classist past." The episode included an audio clip of the former New York City mayor explaining his "stop-and-frisk" policy in specifically racist terms. Bloomberg made the remarks during a Q-and-A session at an annual conference hosted by the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit based in the posh Colorado ski resort.

Ninety-five percent of murders, murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it, and pass it out to all the cops," Bloomberg had said. "They are male, minorities, 16-25. That's true in New York, that's true in virtually every city (inaudible.)”

Dixon, who a few weeks earlier announced his support for Bernie Sanders, had found Bloomberg's remarks on YouTube with a little digging. A reporter who had covered the Aspen event posted his recording on the video-sharing site, where they were mostly ignored for years.

That all changed when Dixon's tweet started to trend on Twitter and people added the #BloombergIsARacist hashtag to posts they shared with friends and followers, fanning the flames of viral growth.

As other media outlets started to cover the story, Bloomberg's campaign sprang into action to contain the growing crisis, as Politicoreporters Sally Goldenberg and Christopher Cadelago detailed in a Feb. 13 story.