Much like the national media shielding President Biden over his age and senility, before it swiftly turned on him after the debate, those same media outlets are now defending Vice President Kamala Harris in a similar fall-on-your-sword fashion.
“The amount of obfuscating, and the deliberate ‘AstroTurfed’ support, is mind boggling,” says Bill D'Agostino of the Media Research Center.
Citing one ongoing example, D’Agostino says media outlets are circling the wagons around Harris and her “border czar” duties as Vice President. President Biden handed Harris the duty of addressing illegal immigration at the southern border in March 2021, but polls show the open southern border has become a main concern for voters after an estimated 10 million illegal aliens have entered the country during Biden’s term.
Enter the liberal news media to help, beginning with a bizarre controversy over Harris and the “border czar” title. In a story published late last week, MRC cited stories from The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Axios, and Time magazine that all insist Harris was never given the title “border czar” by Biden. And technically that claim is somewhat true – the White House transcript doesn’t contain that word – but the term “czar” is a common phrase in politics because it refers to a person in government appointed for a specific task.
A 2009 story by Politico, the liberal news website, for example, named 16 Obama-era czars who worked in the administration at the time.
Axios 'corrects' its own stories
Of all those wagon-circling stories, the story by Axios last week may have been the most dishonest. That is because the reporter who wrote that story, Stef Kight, also wrote a 2021 story that used the “border czar” phrase for Harris.
After that Kight story and two more related Axios stories were cited in “Community Notes” on X, Axios issued an “editor’s note” to state it “incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar’ back in 2021.”
Asked why the news media seems to be fixated over an unofficial title, D’Agostino says the issue is about more than just a title.
“They couldn't let the ‘border czar’ thing go,” he tells AFN, “because otherwise they felt they'd be allowing Republicans to tar her with Biden's horrible reputation on the border.”
Realizing the issue is a top one for voters, he adds, the media doesn’t want the border czar title to become “synonymous” with Harris as Election Day approaches.
In a separate AFN interview, Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies predicts Harris will "do everything she can" to avoid the topic of illegal immigration and the southern border on the campaign trail.
"She will try to distance herself from the administration's policies," he says.
Both Harris and the national media will try to cover it up, Arthur adds, "but I really doubt the American people are going to let them get away with it."
D’Agostino and MRC have also watched the media happily read from literal talking points from the Democrat National Committee. Politicians usually rely on such a list in order to stay on message in news interviews, but MRC played a one-minute video clip of major media outlets quoting from the list of talking points, too.
D'Agostino tells AFN the liberal news media is practically reading from Democrat talking points “line-by-line” because it’s an election year and their goal is to get Kamala Harris elected in November.
“If they didn’t want us dragging their reputation through the mud on this,” he concludes, “they could have been more honest.”
Editor's Note: This story has been updated with comments from Art Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies.
