By Philip Klein
Thursday, August 08, 2024
If you listen to the real-time accounts of those closest
to Secretariat’s stunning win at Belmont, you hear everybody saying he was
going way too fast early on and couldn’t possibly maintain his speed throughout
the whole race. And yet, somehow, he managed. Watching the media trip all over
themselves to boost Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy
without asking any critical questions of her, I keep thinking the same thing:
The media can’t possibly maintain this pace for the rest of the election,
right?
On the other hand, what if they are able to?
If we take the broader view of what has unfolded in this
election, we are left with one stunning example of media malpractice after
another. At the start of this year, they spent months trying to cover up
President Biden’s declining mental capacity and attempted to “debunk” any
efforts by conservative media to point out the obvious. Then, when the debate
happened and they could no longer cover it up, they worked 24/7 with Democratic
operatives to hound him out of the race, even seizing on some of the same examples
of mental decline that just weeks earlier they had dismissed as “cheap fakes.” They then pointed to their focus on Biden’s
mental decline as evidence that they were unbiased, despite the fact that they
were merely joining their Democratic friends in lobbying for a stronger ticket.
A further indication that they should not be given the benefit of the doubt is
that once they got their way and Biden dropped out, they stopped seriously
covering his cognitive health. Somehow, the very real problem that our
president is suffering severe mental decline during a global crisis doesn’t matter
to them, because the political conundrum has been solved. The subject that
dominated news coverage for weeks suddenly isn’t a story anymore.
Meanwhile, since Harris was tapped as the obvious
replacement for Biden, we’ve seen unadulterated fawning over her by the media.
There’s the first wave of adoring coverage that permeates every corner of the
media. (The New York Times even quoted an expert who declared, “I don’t think there has been anybody who
understands the power of cooking quite like Kamala.”) Then there is the
secondary coverage, which cites the initial laudatory coverage as evidence that
Harris’s rollout has been so brilliant and smooth.
In the meantime, we are quietly told that Harris has reversed herself on a whole slate of
positions she took during her first run for president, when she supported the
Green New Deal; called for kicking 180 million people off of private insurance;
vowed to ban fracking and offshore drilling; and promised to confiscate AR-15s.
I say we are told this, because Harris has not stated any of this publicly, or
been asked to explain any of these dramatic reversals. Instead, we are just
told that this is now the case because “campaign officials” said so.
Last week I was telling people Harris won’t be able to
get away with this, because if there is one thing that the media care about
more than even their ideological commitments, it is access. And they tend to
turn sour on candidates who don’t provide access. And yet the media is so
pathetic, so sniveling, so eager to prop up Harris, that they don’t care.
Instead, they continue to sit
back like fools to report on her interactions with Girl Scouts rather than
demanding she answer questions. She’s been a candidate for weeks and has not
held a single press conference or done a single interview. I was a conservative
journalist during the Obama era, and I have to say, even he had periods of
negative coverage. I cannot recall anything like what we are now
witnessing.
Politico’s Playbook has a story out today, titled “Why Harris Isn’t Taking
Questions,” that once again is a meta-analysis of how amazing her campaign is
and how there’s no sense in messing with a winning streak. It notes that she
has been informally chatting with reporters on her plane off the record, which,
Dave Weigel surmises, is why we haven’t been hearing more complaints
about access. This makes campaign reporters look even worse. Essentially, it
means that access is all about their own insecurities rather than about
actually doing their jobs and informing the public by asking a candidate for
the presidency to answer challenging questions about her positions on important
issues.
Perhaps the most damning indictment of the media comes
from the Harris campaign itself.
“What is the incentive for her [to take more questions]?”
Politico quotes somebody close to the campaign as saying. “She’s getting
out exactly the message she wants to get out.”
Exactly. If you can get away with scripted events and the
media are happily behaving as a mere extension of your public-relations team,
why bother?
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