Mara Gay argues that attempts to treat both candidates equally are futile in an age of Republican ‘extremism.’
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we look into a suggestion that former president Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris should not be held to the same standards, and cover more media misses.
NYT Columnist Thinks Journalists Should Take it Easy on Kamala
By now it has become clear that Kamala Harris is running a replay of President Biden’s 2020 basement campaign strategy.
The vice president has refused to hold a formal press conference in the nearly 60 days since she succeeded Biden atop the Democratic ticket. She and her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, have participated in just six interviews, compared with the 39 interviews done by former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator J. D. Vance.
Harris has largely managed to avoid answering any serious questions, all while benefitting from glowing press coverage.
And yet it hasn’t been enough for New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay, who claims it’s “a little silly” for reporters to hold Harris and Trump to the same standards.
“I think the challenge, not just for journalists, but really for the country, is that not only is Donald Trump a threat, but, you know, it lowers the bar. So I don’t think it’s unacceptable. And I think it’s important for our role as journalists to really push every candidate for office,” Gay said during an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
“And there are plenty of things that we could hear from the vice president that we’d love to hear more about policy speeches,” she added. “It’d be great to see her take more questions from the press. Those things are important.”
But here’s where it takes a turn.
“It’s just the context is difficult because of the extremism of the Republican Party, because of how extreme Donald Trump is, it’s hard to hold both candidates accountable equally, because one is committed to democracy and is functioning as a normal candidate from a normal American party, and the other is not,” she claimed.
“And so, you know, this is really about the extremism of the Republican ticket. And it’s important to hold all candidates accountable. It’s just that when you do that, it does sometimes sound a little silly, because given the breadth of what the vice president is offering the American people, there is no comparison with Donald Trump,” she said.
Meanwhile, host Joe Scarborough lamented the “sacrosanct” wall between editorials and news as it pertains to the presidential candidates and claimed it was absurd to believe there is a “moral equivalency” between criticizing the two candidates.
And yet that commitment to neutrality that Scarborough and Gay find so inconvenient didn’t stop New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger from laying out how the “quiet war against press freedom” could come to America under a second Trump administration.
Writing in the Washington Post, Sulzberger detailed how Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán and other leaders have silenced the press and suggested Trump could do the same.
“It’s not a crazy question. As they seek a return to the White House, former president Donald Trump and his allies have declared their intention to increase their attacks on a press he has long derided as ‘the enemy of the people,’” he wrote.
“After several years out of power, the former leader is returned to office on a populist platform. He blames the news media’s coverage of his previous government for costing him reelection. As he sees it, tolerating the independent press, with its focus on truth-telling and accountability, weakened his ability to steer public opinion. This time, he resolves not to make the same mistake,” the publisher said.
Still, Sulzberger claims that he disagrees with the suggestion that “the risk Trump poses to the free press is so high that news organizations such as mine should cast aside neutrality and directly oppose his reelection.”
As such, Sulzberger attempts to maintain a sense of objectivity by claiming to be speaking out against Trump only because he feels “compelled to speak out about threats to the free press, as my predecessors and I have done to leaders of both parties.”
Yes, Trump is committed to bashing the media every chance he gets, but he and his running mate do engage with reporters — something Harris and Walz have refused to do. And, as president, Biden has been much less accessible to the press than Trump was. In fact, the Biden White House repeatedly refused interview requests from Sulzberger and his top editor, Joe Kahn. Sulzberger made brief note of Biden’s press avoidance in his op-ed but didn’t mention the disappearing act that Harris has pulled off as the Democratic nominee.
In any case, one need not look far to find examples of misleading news coverage of the Republican ticket.
Just last week the Associated Press was forced to issue a correction after it published a headline that misled readers about comments Vance made after the tragic school shooting in Georgia.
“I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said in the wake of the shooting. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security, so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able.”
But the AP included a partial quote in its headline that completely altered the sentiment behind Vance’s words. “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,” the headline and X post originally read.
Vance’s team blasted the outlet.
“This is yet another case of the fake news media brazenly lying about a Republican politician. Senator Vance said exactly the opposite of what the Associated Press claimed. It should come as no surprise that the AP lost any and all credibility it had years ago, because they will lie about literally anything in order prop up the Democrats. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris has called for all police officers to be removed from schools, putting children all over America at risk. It’s yet another example of how Kamala Harris’s weak, failed, and dangerously liberal agenda makes her unfit for office,” spokesman William Martin said.
The AP later amended its headline to read: “JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and calls for better security.”
“This post replaces an earlier post that was deleted to add context to the partial quote from Vance,” the outlet explained.
Headline Fail of the Week
The Nation warns readers about “The Dark Side of the Democratic Party’s Embrace of Football.”
Democrats are “claiming football for themselves; presenting the sport as not only patriotic but as a potent symbol of the kind of teamwork needed to take down Donald Trump,” writes sports editor Dave Zirin, pointing to Walz’s role as a former defensive coordinator at Mankato East High School.
Yet Democrats’ attempts to steal football away from the Right are not without consequence, Zirin writes.
“The platforming of football as a patriotic totem cannot be separated from the sport’s embrace of hypermasculinity and violence. These two pernicious parts of the game connected smoothly with the themes in Harris’s red-meat convention speech: nationalism and a shift to the right alongside a bellicose declaration of war-readiness—having the most ‘lethal fighting force.’ This message was set to chants of ‘USA,’ warming the heart of even Meghan McCain.”
Media Misses
• Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg offered an extreme take last week: “”If I had a choice between getting rid of Hamas and getting rid of [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, I’d choose Netanyahu.”
“There will always be another terror group to take Hamas’ place. But I don’t think Israel can ever have a worse leader than Netanyahu,” he explained.
• New York Times book critic Jennifer Szalai questioned in a recent article whether the Constitution is “dangerous.” “Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional,” Szalai wrote, citing Trump’s loss of the popular vote in 2016.
• The South China Morning Post adopted an unconventional angle in its coverage of the recent arrest of Linda Sun, a former deputy chief of staff to New York governor Kathy Hochul. Sun is accused of acting as an agent of Beijing. The outlet claimed that Asian Americans “fear a backlash” over the arrest.