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 taking questions?
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?