Can anyone deny that media coverage of Kamala Harris, driven by elitist liberals, is fawning? There's an effort to purge any commentary that contradicts the current dogma that Harris is a progressive hero—someone who’s uniquely qualified to heal the nation from the malaise of the Trump years.
Harris has come a long way since that July, 2019 evening when fellow presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard gutted the California senator. "Senator Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president," the House member from Hawaii began, "But I’m deeply concerned about this record." Gabbard then mentioned the 1500 people Harris had jailed, as California AG, for marijuana violations, adding that the prosecutor had laughed about it when was asked, in reference to this issue, if she'd ever smoked marijuana herself—the answer was "yes." "She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row," continued Gabbard, "And she kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California.” As for Harris wanting to be a "prosecutor president" in the world's biggest incarceration state, that sounds like something Trump would say, and Democrats would call him a dictator for it. Anyway, if someone needs to be prosecuted, that's the DOJ's job, not the president's.
A stunned Harris had no comeback to her rival's factual attack on her record. Later on, talking to Anderson Cooper, Harris tried to put down Gabbard: "I'm a top-tier candidate." Harris wasn't a top-tier candidate even in her own state, where she was polling at eight percent in October 2019.
The reality is Harris was a terrible candidate who couldn't connect with voters. But she can connect with the media, which has held a love-in for her ever since Biden picked her. That's the same media that started pushing the sketchy "Kamala Harris is the next Obama" narrative in 2018. They had to drop that when she bombed out, but were thrilled once Harris got the Veep selection.
Now the media's presenting Harris as the daughter of immigrants who groomed her to be an advocate for minorities as they attended civil-rights rallies when she was a child. When Harris left her post as California's prosecutor, African-Americans were incarcerated more than five times their percentage of the state's population. But now all we hear about is what a friend to BLM she is. What real advocate for black people wants a political job for which they'll be prosecuting black people for non-violent offenses?
Do the nightly cable newscasts light up their Harris devotional candles before going on the air every evening? They do at MSNBC, a network obsessed with race and gender that constantly reminds us Harris is the first female, black, and Indian-American vice president. Ever since Biden picked her, the media has covered Harris' gender and race disproportionately, as if policy was an afterthought. And policy has become an afterthought in a Democratic Party that's consumed with identity politics.
NBC News ran a story claiming the media is showing its bias when it mentions Harris' race and gender more than it does for white politicians like Mike Pence, and it cites the findings of a report from Time's Up Now, an organization dedicated to fighting gender-based discrimination.
The report found only five percent of media coverage of politicians like Mike Pence and Tim Kaine mentioned race and/or gender, but when the coverage isn't of white males nearly two-thirds of it mentioned race. That Times Up Now wants us to believe that this disparity is caused by bias against women and minorities is either delusional or intentionally misleading. The media would mention Pence's race and gender in order to disparage him as a dreaded "white male." But the media doesn't harp on Harris' race and gender to disparage her; they do it to extol her. The fact that she checks three diverse demographic boxes is the main reason that they're interested. Policy issues bore the media.