The buzz for Kamala Harris is not happening without some major help from the liberal news media, which appears unburdened by accurately describing her record as a U.S. senator and as vice president in the White House.
One example is GovTrack.us, which presents itself as an independent website that helps the public track congressional voting records. Or at least it did. It is now backtracking on a previous entry that rated Harris as the "most liberal" U.S. senator, Fox News reported.
Harris, the former San Francisco district attorney and attorney general for California, served in the Senate from 2017-2021 before entering the White House.
“That page on their website has disappeared and also a page that had a personal profile for Sen. Harris from that year,” Joshua Arnold, senior writer for The Washington Stand, said on Washington Watch Friday.
“They came out with a response that was something like, ‘Oh, you know, it's one year of data isn't the most reliable to determine a senator’s entire voting record,' but the truth is their page from 2020 is still up. It calls her the second-most liberal senator in that year, right behind Bernie Sanders. Their page from 2018 is still up that called her the fourth-most liberal senator for that year,” Arnold told show host Jody Hice.
GovTrack is not the only media outlet to do so. AFN previously reported how the news website Axios was caught changing its own published stories about Harris and her "border czar" title.
By contrast, media outlets are busily combing through past comments from Sen. J.D. Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential running mate. Without providing any context, Vance is being criticized on everything from making fun of liberal "cat ladies" to comments about abortion and raising children.
'You're considered the most liberal U.S. senator'
GovTrack awards senators an “ideology score’ from 1.0 (most conservative) to 0.0 (most liberal), Newsweek explained. The score is based on each senator’s legislative actions. It compares the pattern of bills and resolutions they co-sponsor to other members of Congress.
In 2019, GovTrack.us gave Sen. Bernie Sanders an ideology score of 0.02 compared to 0.00 for Harris. They ranked No. 1 and No. 2 as the Senate’s most liberal members. Harris joined bipartisan bills less than any other senator.
Harris was questioned on her GovTrack rating by CBS news program 60 Minutes while she was Biden’s running game.
“You’re considered the most liberal U.S. senator …,” the interviewer noted.
“Somebody said that, and it was actually Mike Pence on the debate stage,” Harris responded before she was corrected by the host who pointed out her support for the Green New Deal, Medicare and the legalization of marijuana.
“What changed is that Kamala Harris had to win over a different audience instead of playing to the California electorate,” Arnold said. “Before that she came from San Francisco which is very liberal. Now she’s trying to win votes among the general electorate, the median voter that’s probably going to be deciding presidential elections.”
Border czar or not border czar
Axios, meanwhile, has worked to convince people that Harris was never ‘border czar’ even though its own reporting labeled her that in 2021 shortly after she and Biden took office. They’ve been blasted on social media for their new claims.
Early on, Biden tasked Harris with digging into the root causes of mass migration from Central and South America.
The border has become a blight on the Biden administration’s record, and Axios isn’t the only media outlet trying to soften the blow.
On the flip side, Vance comments in a podcast from three years ago – when he prioritized the life of the unborn ahead of very difficult circumstances for the mother -- are under the microscope.
“It's not whether women should be forced to bring a child to term. It's whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child's birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to society, the question really, to me, is about the baby,” Vance said. “We want women to have opportunities. We want women to have choices. Above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life.”
Some media are saying that Vance has minimized tragic circumstances like rape and incest to mere inconveniences.
Mary Szoch, The Family Research Council’s director for The Center for Human dignity, told Hice that Vance was right to pivot from the host’s original question to focus on the child.
“What he did in this interview was challenge the question. He said when we're talking about cases of rape, really what we're talking about is a heinous crime that was committed against a woman and that we should condemn with full force.
“But what we have to ask ourselves is in America, do we live in a society where an unborn child, where an innocent baby, should be given the death sentence because that child's father committed a heinous crime. That's the question that the Left doesn't want to answer,” Szoch said.
Compassion for mother, child can coincide
Szoch said as a society we absolutely need to focus on justice and compassion for the mother and that the child can be cared for in the process.
Crisis centers and other resources are available to help a mother heal after she carries a difficult pregnancy to term, Szoch said.
Successful men and women alike have stated publicly how thankful they are for mothers who did not choose abortion, Szoch said.
“There are tragic circumstances within which a child is conceived, and we need to condemn those. We need to work for justice for the mother in those situations. Justice for the mother includes justice for that unborn child, includes love and compassion and care for that child. We can’t say that if they’re living in poverty or a life that will be full of physical and intellectual challenges that they can be killed,” she said.
