That much was made clear by the coverage of the Trump–Harris debate.
That much was made clear by the coverage of the Trump–Harris debate.
M embers of the press increasingly have no idea what conservatives believe.
What’s different now is that, apparently, members of the press also have no idea what the Democratic presidential nominee believes.
Take, for example, the treatment of Donald Trump’s performance last week in his debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. The former president lobbed several serious allegations at his opponent, including that she supports taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants and abortion with no limitations, even up to the moment of birth. Trump also referred to an incident in which a chunk of downtown Seattle was overtaken by far-left agitators cut from the same cloth as the rioters Harris supported during the 2020 anti-police riots.
On each count, Trump was challenged and “corrected,” either in real time by the debate moderators, ABC News’ David Muir and Linsey Davis, or afterward by a national press that is about as ignorant as it is overconfident.
The funny thing is that on each of the above counts, Trump is correct. The journalists are wrong. Is this a display of ignorance or outright dishonesty? Take your pick.
“[Harris] wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison,” Trump said. “This is a radical left liberal that would do this.”
At the New Yorker, which boasts of an unusually thorough and rigorous fact-checking process, journalist Susan Glasser asked in her postdebate column, “What the hell was he talking about?”
“No one knows,” she declared confidently.
CNN, which reported last week on Harris’s support for sex changes for illegal immigrants, knows. People who read Andrew Kaczynski’s KFile on the CNN website or saw him on Erin Burnett’s show know. The news sites that piggybacked onto CNN’s exclusive reporting know. Most of all, the American Civil Liberties Union, to whom Harris professed her support for taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal immigrants in custody, knows.
Other than that, a great question from the New Yorker, the home of the supposedly rigorous fact-check.
Meanwhile, Time magazine, which is known less for fact-checking and more for being the type of publication to include Evelyn Waugh on a list of the “100 Most Read Female Writers in College Classes,” declared in its postdebate coverage that “Trump glowered and grimaced, spewing old grievances and strange new attacks. The former President . . . falsely claimed that Harris ‘wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens in prison.’”
The story carries three bylines. Three reporters, and not one of them bothered to do the bare minimum required of their profession (and this is to say nothing of the editors and web producers who likewise didn’t catch the bogus “fact-check”).
At the Atlantic, the same false reporting.
“Donald Trump said some strange things, even by his own standards,” said staff writer Ali Breland. “[He] falsely suggested that Kamala Harris wants to do ‘transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.’ This is not merely the stuff of normal Trumpian discourse. This is the stuff of someone who is merely spending way too much time on the right-wing internet.”
Time eventually corrected its reporting. Now, the story bears an editor’s note, which explains that, as a presidential candidate in 2019, “Harris filled out a questionnaire saying she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition treatment for detained immigrants.”
The Atlantic likewise affixed an editor’s note to its coverage, conceding that the thing that sounded insane to its staff writer is a thing Harris actually supports.
Elsewhere, Trump attacked Harris for being a radical on abortion, referencing her party’s often implicit and sometimes explicit support for abortion at any time during pregnancy.
“They have abortion in the ninth month,” the Republican said. “They’re radical. The Democrats are radical in that. And her vice-presidential pick . . . says abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine. He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay.”
To all of this, Davis retorted flatly, “There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born.”
Between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2022, the Minnesota Department of Health recorded eight cases in which infants were born alive during abortion procedures. None of the children survived, the department reported.
More specifically, five born-alive cases were reported between January 1 and December 31, 2021. In those cases, the Minnesota Department of Health said “no measures taken to preserve life were reported” for three of them.
Later, in 2023, Minnesota governor Tim Walz signed legislation repealing nearly all of the language of the 2015 Born Alive Infants Protection Act and much of the language of the state’s original 1976 statute protecting born-alive infants. The bill also overturned many of the state’s abortion reporting requirements, including reporting on born-alive infants, reports the Dispatch’s Alex Demas.
Minnesota currently has no statutory limitations on abortions at any stage of pregnancy.
While we’re on the topic, it’s worth noting that nine states and the District of Columbia likewise have no gestational limits on abortions. In the nation’s capital specifically, a woman can get an abortion at 32 to 36 weeks. And for good measure, via the University of Utah: “If a fetus reaches 32 weeks gestation and you deliver at 32 weeks gestation, your preemie’s chance of surviving is as high as 95 percent. Their chance of dying during infancy and childhood is also very low.”
Most relevant of all, Davis asked Harris specifically, “Would you support any restrictions on a woman’s right to an abortion?”
Harris never answered the question, and Davis never bothered to follow up. It’s no wonder why, considering Davis does not appear to know what Harris and the Democratic Party support or what is and isn’t legal in the states.
At another point during the debate, Trump asked, “When are the people that burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted or in Seattle? They went into Seattle, they took over a big percentage of the city of Seattle.”
To this, the Seattle Times put out a “fact-check” with the tweet, “Trump falsely claimed during the presidential debate Tuesday that protesters took over a big portion [of] Seattle during the Capitol Hill Organized Protest in 2020.”
The “fact-check,” written by staff writer Vonnai Phair, rests on the premise that an area covering six to eight blocks, which is the approximate size of the “zone” occupied by lawless activists, is not that big. We’re talking about an area that included businesses, a public park, and residential complexes. Also, the activists took over a police station.
Meanwhile, at CNN, “fact-checker” Daniel Dale declared that, in his preliminary count, Trump “made at least 33 false claims,” whereas Harris made only one.
Oh, come on. Even the laziest student knows you must fudge the numbers a little to make the cheating less obvious. And what was the single false statement? That Trump left the White House “with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression.”
As for Harris’s claim that a reelected Trump would follow the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 (he and his campaign, which had nothing to do with the policy document, have repeatedly disavowed it), that he will create a department specifically to “monitor” pregnancies and miscarriages (he has not endorsed this), that he threatened a “bloodbath” if he loses reelection (he threatened no such thing; he was speaking about the future of the U.S. auto industry under a potential second Biden administration), and that law-enforcement officers died on January 6 (no police officers died on January 6, and the one law-enforcement death most commonly attributed to the riot was ruled as being unconnected to the events of that day, according to the chief medical examiner in Washington, D.C.) — well, CNN couldn’t summon the energy to review those claims, let alone rate them.
Harris also falsely claimed that Trump supports a national abortion ban (he doesn’t), that he wants to ban IVF (he doesn’t), and that “nowhere in America is a woman carrying a pregnancy to term and asking for an abortion” (CDC data show thousands of abortions are performed annually after 21 weeks of gestation; the data don’t include statistics from Maryland, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and California, so the actual number is likely higher than even what the CDC reports). But who’s counting falsehoods anyway?
This is where we are.
Trump gets fact-checked in real time on national television, while Harris’s boosters in the press don’t even know what she supports, let alone fact-check her on anything.
Is it ignorance or lying?
If it’s ignorance, I’m not sure who looks worse — Harris, for supporting such insane policies, or the exceptionally accommodating press, whose reaction to being exposed to the Democratic nominee’s extreme positions was to assume they’re made up.
And if they’re lying, what good are they as journalists?