As a new Gallup poll shows public confidence in media at a record low, the shameless effort to rehabilitate sudden presidential candidate Kamala Harris shows why.
Just one month ago, the media-industrial complex attempted to convince Americans that accumulating – and undoctored – video clips of Joe Biden showing obvious mental and physical decline were somehow “cheap fakes.” Conspicuously, those leveling that claim never offered contradictory video correcting the record, thereby betraying their dishonesty.
After Biden’s June 27 debate debacle, however, their “cheap fake” strategy became too preposterous even for them.
Apparently unchastened by that debacle, the media quickly undertook an equally shameless attempt to rehabilitate Kamala Harris this week as she became the Democrats’ nominee. Specifically, they’re now working furiously to conceal her central role in an immigration crisis at our southern bordered that has festered throughout the Biden presidency.
In March 2021, just two months into his administration, Biden tasked Harris with leading the effort to stem that emerging crisis. The same leftist media that now seeks to minimize her role made no such attempt in the aftermath of the announcement. CBS News ran the headline “Harris to Lead Administration’s Efforts to Stem Migration at Border.” Politico announced “Biden Makes Harris the Point Person on Immigration Issues Amid Border Surge.”
Overseas news organizations were no different, with the BBC running the headline “Biden Tasks Harris with Tackling Migrant Influx on US-Mexico Border.”
By June of 2021, Harris’s mismanagement of the job got so bad that it led to one of her most cringeworthy video debacles ever in a sit-down interview with NBC’s Lester Holt:
Holt: Do you have any plans to visit the border?
Harris: I, at some point, you know, it… We are going to the border… We’ve been to the border… So, this whole… This whole… This whole thing about the border… We’ve been to the border… We’ve been to the border…
Holt: You haven’t been to the border.
Harris: I… And I haven’t been to Europe. And, I mean, I don’t, I don’t understand the point you’re making. I’m not discounting the importance of the border.
Here’s where it gets particularly interesting.
On April 14, 2021, Axios reporter Shawna Chen used the term “border czar” to describe Harris’s role in her “diplomatic effort to address surging migration at the US-Mexico border.” But now, Axios is busy retroactively scrubbing three-year-old articles with the following note now that the term has become politically inconvenient: “Editors note: This article has been updated and clarified to note that Axios was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ in 2021.”
Other legacy media sources like Time, CNN and innumerable others are suddenly taking the same action.
To counter that whitewashing campaign, Newsbusters has assembled a brilliant one-minute video recalling multiple times that reporters from those same media groups used the term “border czar,” then contrasting their new position that it’s simply some false label affixed by Republicans.
Whether one uses the shorthand term “czar” or any other term, however, media organizations once showed no hesitation in characterizing her authority in grand terms. Had she performed her duties in a remotely competent manner, they would not hesitate in characterizing her role in the same way today. Only because the border crisis is now a political liability has the media scrambled to conceal her record.
Moreover, even if Harris’s role was limited to addressing “root causes” of the border crisis, how well has that worked out, given the record numbers that have illegally crossed the border during the Biden/Harris administration?
All of this helps explain why public trust in media stands at an all-time low, according to Gallup’s latest annual poll on Americans’ trust in various U.S. institutions. In contrast, small business, the military and police score above 50% in respondents saying that they possess a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in them. Far down the list, television scores only 12% expressing such confidence, while newspapers perform only slightly better at 18%.
Between now and November Americans will hear endless discussion of various candidates’ popularity and unpopularity from mainstream media. We’d all be better off if those media voices engaged in more self-examination regarding their own abysmal ratings, and perhaps engage in some course-correction that would benefit us all.