THEY’RE NOT DOING JOURNALISM, THEY’RE DOING CHEERLEADING: The liberal media’s gushing over Kamala Harris is an embarrassment to journalism.
Donald Trump and his allies are missing the point. Yes, of course liberal media outlets in the US are biased towards Kamala Harris. They’re always biased towards the Democrats’ candidate. Nothing new there.
What makes their behaviour right now so remarkable is not that they’re being partisan. It’s that they’re willing to be partisan even though the object of their adulation has been giving them absolutely nothing in return. They’re cheerleading for someone who won’t even speak to them.
But at least she isn’t publicly insulting them and locking them in closets, so Vice President Harris is certainly a step up in that regard from the (p)resident. What we’re seeing from the DNC-MSM is what they’ve been doing in election cycles since arguably 2004:
At least in 2008 and 2012 they had a candidate who had much better skills as a politician, and was unknown enough so that the rock star treatment could seem warranted to the uninitiated.
Exit quote:
Even if liberal US media outlets no longer care about journalistic scrutiny, surely they should, at bare minimum, be motivated by their own commercial interests. Interviews with the woman of the moment would cause clicks and sales to surge. So they might at least have demanded she offer them something in exchange for their gurgling sycophancy. Yet here they are, giving it away free of charge.
Still, I suppose they deserve some credit. Nowadays it’s fairly common for journalists to quit the media for PR. Yet some, impressively, have the energy to fill both jobs at once.
Oh they’re definitely doing PR. They just like having the J-word on their business cards, for legacy reasons.
UPDATE: Seven Theories of Press Complicity with the Harris Campaign.
By dumping their unpopular incumbent nominee midstream, a coup apparently masterminded by the aged former speaker of the House, and seamlessly substituting a new nominee and then unifying their party behind her and subduing the press into prostration, Democratic power brokers have indeed played the inside-the-Beltway game very well the past month. If your concept of political journalism is simply to cheer those who wield the knife well, that yields good coverage. But it’s not what a free press is for in a free and democratic republic.
I miss the idea of a “free press…in a free and democratic republic” — but that notion died 50 years ago during the Watergate hearings.
MORE: Kamala Harris’s media gambit is working. “[T]here is an extensive record, much of it on video, of Harris making her views clear on issues like taxes, healthcare, immigration, energy, and others. Since she has never renounced or changed those statements, don’t they remain her views, at least until she says otherwise? As far as many of the nation’s top journalists are concerned, though, there’s no need to hear it from the candidate herself. For Kamala Harris and her admirers in the media, saying nothing is enough.”