There’s a preposterous idea circulating in the chattering class of late: that Vice President Kamala Harris is being held to an unfairly high standard because of her race and gender.
Of course, we all know why this is suddenly on every pair of liberal lips. With news that Harris is losing the race for the White House — the polls, election forecasts, and early voting tallies all suggest a bad night for the vice president — Democrats and their media allies are eager to shift the blame.
It can’t be their fault she’s losing, after all. That would require soul-searching on their part and perhaps even a change in behavior.
And so Harris’s recent struggles must be pinned on a bias so deeply internalized that it pervades even Democrat-friendly airwaves.
In this version of reality, the problem isn’t the quality of the candidate but the persistence of Anderson Cooper’s gentle nudging at a CNN town hall. I mean, can anyone imagine former President Donald Trump receiving such an intensive interrogation?
Following the town hall, CNN analyst Van Jones lamented: “They’re not taking the same test. One has the remedial test. It has extra time and all of the extra things, whereas she’s taking the AP test.”
For Jones, apparently, the “AP test” of politics includes questions such as, “Name one weakness you have,” “Name one mistake you’ve made,” and “What is the first policy you’d like to pursue in office?”
These aren’t AP questions — they are kindergarten questions. And Harris could hardly string a sentence together in response.
Days later, former first lady Michelle Obama echoed Jones’s critique of the media at a rally in Michigan.
“Voters have every right to ask hard questions of any candidate seeking office,” she continued. “But can someone tell me why we are once again holding Kamala to a higher standard than her opponent?”
To be sure, the comical suggestion that the press have been too tough on Harris, while being too soft on Trump, will gain traction in the wake of a Harris defeat. For the Left, claiming that women and people of color in politics face a double standard is a deeply conditioned response. And in some instances, it’s surely true. Just not in this one.
Since the day Harris took over the top of the ticket without winning a single primary vote — which is nothing new for Harris since she didn’t earn a single primary vote in 2020, either, despite actually running — the press have tripped over themselves to promote and protect the vice president’s political prospects.
The kiddie-gloves treatment began with the brazen lie that Harris had never been the Biden administration’s “border czar.” Anchors and reporters practically jumped out of their shoes in defense of Harris when Republican guests referred to her with the title — despite the fact that many of them had used it themselves. In a preview of the slobbering coverage that was to come, the legacy media stepped in as informational bodyguards for the vice president on her most vulnerable issue.
And as “Brat Summer” unfolded, the Harris campaign’s theme of “joy” was reflected on the faces of mainstream journalists like June sunlight on a lake. The New York Times ran numerous articles extolling the politics of joy, including an analysis titled: “Harris Used to Worry About Laughing. Now Joy Is Fueling Her Campaign.” The Atlantic ran a deeply probing piece on Harris’s little-known vice presidential nominee called “Tim Walz Loves Food” that explored what could be “the most food-centric presidential campaign in American history.” NPR celebrated the new Democratic ticket’s first week of campaigning together, saying the two had “barnstormed joyfully, lifted by the cheers of the largest rally crowds of their campaign.”
The scrutiny on Harris’s candidacy was so thin in the early days that she was allowed to wait 39 days before giving a single interview. In an unprecedented election cycle, this is perhaps the most incredible fact. And when she finally did sit with CNN’s Dana Bash, the prerecorded interview, chaperoned awkwardly by Walz, produced only 16 minutes of speaking time from Harris, and a substantial portion featured the new nominee’s retelling of the moment she received the call from President Joe Biden of his plans to drop out of the race.
The first and only presidential debate between Harris and Trump in early September added to the perception of media bias favoring Harris in a big way. Moderated by ABC News, a network run by a Disney executive who held a fundraiser for Harris in her home as recently as 2022 and who introduced Harris to her husband, the debate featured one-way fact-checking despite numerous whoppers being told by both participants.
The spectacle of Trump debating Harris and moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis, who happens to be a sorority sister of Harris, was so outrageous that it may have ended the enterprise of presidential debates altogether.
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes loved it, though, the latter posting on X that ABC moderators did “an *excellent* job.”
“The legacy media are a part of the Kamala Harris campaign at this point,” Brent Bozell, founder of Media Research Center, told the Washington Examiner. “They have no standards whatsoever, even attacking far-left journalists who dare ask her one tough question. It’s the worst I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Bozell’s Media Research Center found that 85% of Trump coverage on CBS, NBC, and ABC has been negative, while 78% of the coverage of Harris on those channels has been positive. These numbers are only surprising in that they aren’t more lopsided in Harris’s favor. Has Harris really had 22% worth of negative coverage on these channels? It’s hard to believe.
The CNN town hall with Cooper last week, which became a solo event only after Trump refused to participate in his third presidential debate this year, was supposed to help Harris fill out the blanks of her persona on a friendly network. But, in addition to the supposedly AP-level questions from the audience, Cooper’s insistence on extracting Harris’s position on funding a border wall proved too tough for the presidential hopeful.
Even famed Democratic strategist David Axelrod couldn’t hide his contempt for her performance.
“The thing that would concern me is when she doesn’t want to answer a question, her habit is to kind of go to word salad city, and she did that on a couple of answers,” he said following the event on CNN.
And yet, for Harris’s supporters, it was proof positive that she was being held to an unfairly high standard in comparison to her opponent.
Democrats on X unleashed a torrent of criticism on Cooper for daring to press for answers.
“I came across this whole inundation from people who are Harris supporters saying to me online today, ‘How dare you? What a betrayal that you would ask her these questions,’” Cooper later said. “And I’m like, you misunderstand what my job is. I’m not on MSNBC.”
But the MSNBC standard seems to be the only acceptable one for Harris supporters. Even the slightest application of journalistic pressure is unfair in their eyes.
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Meanwhile, Harris has still not given a press conference — not that anyone in the legacy media seems to care.
The question isn’t whether Harris is being held to an unfairly high standard but whether she’s been held to any standard at all.
Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and staff writer for the National Catholic Register.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
