OPINION:
People are saying that the news media have forgotten why they exist.
That’s understandable since they’ve transformed Vice President Kamala Harris, an untalented politician with unpopular positions, into an immaculate candidate who shall not be questioned.
But it’s more likely that many of them have just decided to do the reverse of what their job is supposed to be. Instead of informing people, they’ve decided — again — to keep important facts hidden.
Those who run the Harris campaign didn’t have to be political geniuses to figure out how to take advantage of the situation: The candidate was ordered not to utter a single word that was not predetermined or scripted. And they clearly banked on the media not making a fuss.
We are approaching a month since Ms. Harris became the presumed presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, replacing President Biden in a bloodless coup after his decline became impossible to conceal after a corpselike debate performance against former President Donald Trump. And in that time, Ms. Harris has not sat for an interview, held a news conference or meaningfully engaged in anything that hasn’t been scripted.
Yet journalists are happily doing her work for her.
The new cover of Time magazine is a drawing of Ms. Harris’ face, smiling gently and looking slightly skyward, above the headline, “Her Moment.” Incidentally, Ms. Harris’ campaign declined to make her available for the story, which means that Time gave her the Mother Teresa treatment even after she had shunned them.
The pathetic Associated Press ran a headline that said “Harris is pushing joy while Trump paints a darker picture” as though the AP were the Harris campaign itself.
Her running mate gets the same slobbering.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is largely immune from criticism about the many years he spent lying about the rank he retired with from the National Guard, and for his false claims to have seen combat.
He did receive a love note, however, from Politico that gushed, “Male politicians are usually terrible at dressing down, but Tim Walz is one of the few who can pull it off.”
Seriously, that was a post on Politico’s X feed.
To put a fine point on it: The Harris campaign is ignoring the media, and the media can’t get enough of it.
While some journalists are polishing Ms. Harris’ new image, their colleagues have been dutifully cleansing her record of the radical policy positions she has held for years as a San Francisco liberal. One after another, her campaign gave reporters “scoops” to announce that Ms. Harris had “rolled back” a policy position or “pivoted” to some other one.
There’s no doubt that she’s lying about her “evolution” away from positions she has held for years, including supporting a ban on fracking for natural gas, wanting to make unauthorized border crossings legal, and demanding a mandatory government buyback of legally owned guns. But reporters are granting her these 180-degree changes to her positions based on the say-so of campaign staff and not the candidate herself.
It’s a safe bet that Ms. Harris has never had to explain why she supports fracking (because she doesn’t), but it would be a neat idea for the media to get her to try, don’t you think?
The failed cover-up of Mr. Biden’s decrepitude is very recent history, and the media are already forgetting why it happened the way it did. It should have embarrassed many of them because they had assisted in hiding the truth about the president’s condition from the American people to that point.
But until they were forced to cover what had become apparent to all, the media failed to vet Mr. Biden on the state of his mental abilities. Now they’re failing to vet Ms. Harris on the basic questions of who she is and what she believes.
This is the same media that steadfastly ignored the Biden family’s notorious scheme to sell access to “the Big Guy” and peddle influence.
To go a step beyond all this, there is a popular notion among liberals that news outlets ought to stop giving Mr. Trump a platform by reporting on him, too. One Washington Post reporter went as far as to ask in the White House press secretary’s briefing if there were some way for Mr. Biden to prevent Mr. Trump from appearing with Elon Musk in a recent public conversation on X.
Ironically, the official slogan of the Post is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
Instead of providing information to the public, the media are actively engaged in keeping certain news unreported. So it doesn’t appear that they’ve forgotten what their job is supposed to be. It’s that they’re determined to do the opposite.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist, communications consultant, co-host of the “Line Drive Podcast” and author of the Amazon bestselling book “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It: My Escape From Addiction and Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign.”
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