page_title: Andrew Yang
section_title: Supporters and media coverage
hierarchical_section_title: Andrew Yang / 2020 presidential campaign / Supporters and media coverage
caption_attribution_description: A few more photos from a walkabout of the pre-event activities before the Democratic presidential candidates spoke at the Iowa Democratic Party's Liberty &amp; Justice Celebration in Des Moines, Iowa.
context_page_description: Andrew M. Yang is an American entrepreneur and former presidential candidate. Originally a corporate lawyer, Yang began working in startups and early stage growth companies as a founder or executive from 2000 to 2009. In 2011, he founded Venture for America, a nonprofit organization focused on creating jobs in cities struggling to recover from the Great Recession. He then ran as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.
  The son of immigrants from Taiwan, Yang was raised in New York. He attended Brown University and then Columbia Law School. Dissatisfied with his work as an attorney, Yang began working for startups during the dot-com bubble before spending a decade as an executive at test preparation company Manhattan Prep. In 2011, Yang founded VFA, which recruits top college graduates into a two-year fellowship program at startups in developing cities across the United States. The Obama administration selected him in 2011 as a "Champion of Change" and in 2015 as a "Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship." Yang left VFA in 2017 to focus on his presidential campaign.
context_section_description: On multiple occasions, Yang's campaign and supporters have criticized media outlets, such as MSNBC and CNN, for their coverage of Yang. Incidents include cases of news outlets excluding Yang from lists of 2020 Democratic candidates. On August 29, 2019, Yang supporters prompted the hashtag #YangMediaBlackout to trend on Twitter after a CNN infographic displaying the results of a poll included candidate Beto O'Rourke but not Yang, even though the poll showed Yang polling three times higher than O'Rourke. Yang supporters also criticized media outlets for providing disproportionately low coverage of Yang, pointing out that according to The New York Times, Yang has received some of the least coverage in cable news among the candidates, even though he was polling better than most of the field.
  In early September, Yang's lack of media coverage was reported by several media outlets, including CNN. Axios noted that while Yang polled in the top six of the Democratic primary and was "getting plenty of online attention", he was "being treated by the media like a bottom-tier candidate." Krystal Ball of The Hill observed that there was "a persistent pattern of ignoring Yang's candidacy" among media outlets such as CNN. She further noted that Scott Santens, one of Yang's supporters, "has been keeping track of the apparent slights via Twitter." On October 23, 2019, Santens released an article compiling the mainstream media's exclusions of Yang. In November 2019, Yang's campaign manager dismissed an apology by MSNBC for leaving Yang off an infographic, which according to Santens's compilation was the 15th time in the campaign cycle MSNBC or its related networks had wrongfully excluded Yang. On November 23, 2019, following the MSNBC-hosted November debate in which Yang received the least speaking time and was not called upon for the first 30 minutes of the two-hour debate, Yang publicly rejected a request to appear on MSNBC unless the network would "apologize on air, discuss and include our campaign consistent with our polling, and allow surrogates from our campaign as they do other candidates'". A Business Insider analysis found that Yang received significantly less speaking time at debates than would be expected given his polling numbers. In late December 2019, Yang ended his boycott of MSNBC, saying he preferred to "speak to as many Americans as possible."
caption: Yang's supporters form a crowd at the Liberty and Justice Celebration in Des Moines, Iowa. Yang is visible in the background.
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