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The Left used to pressure reporters trying to be objective by insulting them as “stenographers to power.” You can’t just repeat what the powerful say, they argued. You have to expose them.
Well, some of them.
We remember all the lectures during the Trump presidency that all their anti-Trump aggression was just “holding him accountable.” Holding Democrats accountable isn’t really their bag. You don’t win Pulitzer Prizes for damaging Democrats. That’s not landing on the “right side of history.”
With Democrats, it’s apparently dangerous to explore if they might be failing. It’s better to just repeat their spin. That’s what stood out on “The NPR Politics Podcast” on Sept. 23. It was short—only 11 minutes. The title? “How Kamala Harris incorporates her biography into her campaign message.”
NPR White House reporter Tamara Keith claimed to be struck by Harris hammering on her middle-class childhood: “She said, ‘I come from the middle class. I’ll never forget that I came from the middle class.’ She also talks, as you say, about having a single mother, immigrant parents. She is placing herself in the American story in a way that I think is authentic to her, but also meant to maximize who she appeals to.”
It’s amusing that Harris’ middle-class mantra is “authentic to her.” She doesn’t come across as authentic when she unloads this speech every single time she’s asked about an economic policy.
Worse yet, Keith touted how her campaign sources explain she uses this humble-upbringing line as a contrast with the silver spoon in Donald Trump‘s mouth. Keith even repeated Harris’ claim that she worked at McDonald’s one summer in her college years.
Reporters at the Washington Free Beacon tracked down a 1987 job application that insisted applicants should list all jobs held in the last 10 years. Harris didn’t have McDonald’s on hers. They also found there’s no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before a labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019. The job goes unmentioned in both of her memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019.
NPR reporters aren’t investigating this. They merely repeat her life story without investigating it, just as they did for Barack Obama. Nobody investigated his memoirs. They just repeated his tales in admiring tones.
NPR political analyst Domenico Montanaro was impressed with Harris not harping on her gender or race too much, calling it “probably a strong, safe strategy, which makes a lot of sense.” But he said early on, he felt if Harris entered the race, “Trump and Republicans would really struggle in talking about a black woman. And we’ve seen that play out repeatedly, where it really has sort of become a trap for them.”
So, they not only explain the Harris strategy, they praise it, and insist Republicans can’t handle a black woman. Your tax dollars at work.
The podcast ended with NPR reporter Deepa Shivaram throwing racism and sexism into the mix to explain why Harris doesn’t harp on her race or gender: “This isn’t something that she feels like she does have to explain to anyone, let alone the media and largely, like, white reporters who feel the need to ask about this over and over again … . [W]e should point out, Donald Trump does not face these questions, and candidates who are white and male don’t face these questions either.”
No, they face questions about being a racist and sexist who “really struggles in talking about a black woman.” This is why NPR liberals are more excited about Harris’ chances than they were about Joe Biden’s.
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The post When Reporters Are Just Explainers, Not Investigators appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Even battle-hardened conservatives can find it shocking when Democrat-boosting reporters fail to identify Kamala Harris as a “liberal” or a “progressive” or even, dare one say it, a “left-wing radical.”
In a new Media Research Center study of ABC’s “World News Tonight,” since Harris was anointed in a backroom as President Joe Biden’s replacement on July 21, Rich Noyes discovered ABC’s evening-news crew has never applied an ideological label to her. In Harris’ first week as the nominee, CBS cited her “liberal voting record,” and NBC reported she was a “self-described progressive prosecutor.”
But through Sept. 4, ABC’s correspondents never called Harris either a “liberal” or a “progressive.” Instead, eight stories included clips of Republicans (usually Donald Trump) attacking Harris’ liberal record. The ABC team also never criticized Harris’ handling of top issues like painful inflation or illegal immigration.
One way that liberal journalists put a protective bubble around their candidate is to pretend she’s somehow above ideology. They only suggest that this is an attack coming from Trump and JD Vance, and therefore, it’s just negative advertising, not news.
On a debate-preview edition of “The NPR Politics Podcast,” three NPR journalists talked for 18 minutes and barely touched on the labels. Near the end, political analyst Domenico Montanaro typically combined it with Trump: “Trump has sort of started to settle on a message against Harris … that she’s inauthentic, weak, and too liberal.”
The only other label was White House reporter Asma Khalid describing the aftermath of the Trump-Biden debate in June: “There was some criticism, particularly from folks on the Left, that the moderators, CNN, did not fact-check the candidates in real time, and they thought that that was to Biden’s detriment.” But that’s not labeling Harris.
On debate day, NPR’s “Morning Edition” aired a three-and-a-half-minute story titled “Trump likes to attack Harris’ native California. Its politicians say bring it on.” Once again, we’re told Trump unfairly defines Harris and San Francisco.
San Francisco-based reporter Marisa Lagos began: “Trump didn’t mince words at the Economic Club of New York last week, making false claims about Harris and her record.” Trump called her a “Marxist” who nearly destroyed San Francisco. But nowhere in this story is there a “liberal” or “progressive” or “radical.”
But there are two references to “conservative media.” Lagos oozed: “After years of being bashed in conservative media and politics, California politicians are on the offensive this election cycle.” Lagos interviewed San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Sen. Laphonza Butler, and Gov. Gavin Newsom, and none of these lefties are described ideologically. But Newsom fights back in “conservative media.”
In addition, there were two Harris sound bites from her convention speech. We’re told Harris rarely talks about San Francisco or her birthplace in the “East Bay.” That’s Lagos and NPR evading the fact that Harris was born and raised in the radical hotbed of Berkeley, Calif. Instead, they aired audio of Harris saying she grew up in a community based on “kindness, respect, and compassion.” They think that’s synonymous with liberalism.
On the same show, NPR anchor George “A” Martinez interviewed former RNC operative Doug Heye for four minutes, but there were no labels for Harris, because the only topic was how Trump needed to avoid being rude or “personal” to the female candidate.
Harris-backing reporters are going to pretend she is somehow above ideology, as if she’s a guru like Oprah or how Michelle Obama presents herself. They’re not holding Harris accountable for anything that went wrong under Biden or for her radical stands before she was vice president.
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The post When the Media Can’t Find a Left-Wing Label for Kamala Harris appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Taxpayer-subsidized National Public Radio shouldn’t be a starting place for aggressively biased coverage against either Democrats or Republicans. But you can ask Clarence Thomas how the machine works.
On Aug. 27, NPR veterans affairs reporter Quil Lawrence lit into former President Donald Trump for bringing cameras to a section of Arlington National Cemetery with some families of soldiers killed during President Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The entire manufactured controversy is perverse. It’s obvious NPR is exploiting the cemetery for a political goal, and it then spread to the rest of the national media. Trump is showing support for grieving Gold Star families, while Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris would not appear. They were MIA. But Trump was singled out as the one with grotesque political optics, not the no-shows whose negligence cost American lives.
They weren’t seriously considering the Biden-Harris disaster on “All Things Considered.” They could call it “All Democrats Defended.” Conservatives quickly found snapshots from private photographers of Biden in the same sacred section of the Arlington cemetery. That thing cannot be “considered.”
In a different segment of this evening newscast, Lawrence and NPR Pentagon correspondent Tom Bowman reviewed the third anniversary of the Abbey Gate bombing, which led to the death of 13 American service personnel. The segment was headlined: “The chaotic U.S. exit from Afghanistan in 2021 had stems from four administrations.” NPR felt compelled to spread the blame around on everyone.
Bowman spun furiously: “It’s important to note that it was the Trump administration that signed this peace deal that was basically a quick exit plan.” Lawrence added, “There is a lot of failure to go around to the four presidents over the 20 years of war.”
Lawrence was back the next morning to add another layer of reheated Democrat spin to the mix: “You know, Trump has a controversial history with comments about disabled veterans, though, and about fallen soldiers. Some of his former staff have said Trump called fallen World War II troops losers and suckers for fighting and dying when they had no personal gain at stake. Trump denies these comments, but even this year, he mocked the late John McCain for not being able to raise his arms fully.”
One of the most annoying problems with this story is using anonymous cemetery officials to attack Trump’s optics. This leads the public to assume only Trump is being political, that it’s impossible that the people seeking to block Trump and the Gold Star families are partisan Democrats doing damage control.
Democratic journalists should be accused of hiding Democratic activism with an undeserved veil of anonymity. Why grant anonymity here? They’re supposedly nonpartisan public officials.
Lawrence said they stopped talking: “They’ve told NPR and other media outlets that they’re no longer going to answer any questions about this because they want to protect the identity of the official who confronted the Trump campaign.” Then Lawrence closed with one last insult: “But our source told me that they have never seen this level of disrespectful behavior at Arlington, ever.”
This sounds vaguely reminiscent of the anonymous “nonpartisans” at the National Archives that hated Trump so much it eventually led to an armed raid on Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago over some presidential papers. Trump is always the loutish supervillain, and the people heaping negative press on him are painted as patriotic anonymous bureaucrats.
This is the corrupt nature of public broadcasting, loaded almost entirely with partisan Democrats, subsidized by Democratic politicians to provide mudslinging campaign ads disguised as “journalism.” It’s not “public” radio. It’s for the socialist half of the public.
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The post The Entire Manufactured Controversy Over Trump’s Arlington Cemetery Visit appeared first on The Daily Signal.
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