So when is the media going to turn on Harris? I don’t know but I’d guess it’s going to happen pretty soon. It’s inevitable for all the reasons Brian Beutler spelled out in his excellent piece today in Off Message:
As happily as it ended for liberals, the early weeks of July were their darkest since November 2016, illuminating only how various elites will respond if Donald Trump wins the election.
What we saw was disturbing: When it appeared that Trump would win the election all but unopposed, we did not see officeholders take steps to batten down the hatches of the political system, or media figures apply extra scrutiny to the presumptive president. (In 2016, media elites explained away their insipid obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails by citing her poll numbers—she would likely be president, after all, and thus merited a thorough scrubbing.)
Instead, we witnessed what the scholar Timothy Snyder has famously described as “obeying in advance.”
Some of these gestures were truly ominous. Trump threatened to imprison Mark Zuckerberg if elected, and the Facebook founder responded by lifting post-January 6 restrictions on his accounts. When Trump was injured in an assassination attempt, he refused to allow the medical professionals who treated him to brief the media or release his physician notes, but reporters and law enforcement officials didn’t respond by applying their usual rigorous standards, and instead, fearful of antagonizing him, just swallowed his self-serving version of events whole.
But a lot of it looked more like fawning than cowering. Reporters swooned over pictures of Trump bleeding from the ear. For the umpteenth time, they fell like a ward of amnesiacs for his team’s deceptive insistence that Trump would “set a new tone” with his convention speech. Large newspapers went to press celebrating the supposedly chastened Trump before he’d finished delivering his angry, meandering remarks.
Media figures more recently raced to offer a generous interpretation of his pledge to Christian conservatives that they will no longer have to vote after this election. And through it all, they’ve shrugged at the games Trump has played with his campaign promises: selling policy to billionaires, even if it entails reversing his own positions, and lying about the Republican agenda.
Now they tell us, in so many words, that they’re sick and tired of the good Kamala Harris vibes, announcing implicitly that they intend to cover her more adversarially in the near future… It’s hard to know until we see it, but one approach would be for reporters to over-police Harris for policy consistency across a span of many years, while continuing to yawn at the thorough corruption of the Trump agenda.
He goes on to lay out all the ways they’ve already given Trump a pass as they are wont to do and it’s depressingly spot on. The reaction to the assassination attempt was the most vivid example. His flagrant flip-flopping on issues as he corruptly bribes various constituencies has garnered almost no reporting. The man actually told oil executives that if they give him a billion dollars he’s lift all regulations on their industry. Crickets.
Meanwhile, Harris is going to be held to account for any slight variation in her policies from the 2020 primary campaign today and will be hounded as an unprincipled hypocrite for changing her mind. (You know how women are …)
Beutler concludes:
But here’s the critical difference between Harris and Trump: However Harris defines her issue positions in the year 2024, you can take them to the bank. Obviously circumstances can change in ways that require rethinking policy. But if she says no Medicare for all, she’s not going to win the election and spring a single-payer health-insurance plan on Congress when she takes office. However she evolved, the claim that she evolved will be credible.
In Trump’s case, the same claim is not credible. His well-established record of dishonesty is central to the true story of his agenda. If anything, the press owes Harris a greater spirit of generosity: She’s not only more honest than Trump, she’s also taking up the baton unexpectedly from the administration she served for four years—why wouldn’t her new agenda reflect a commitment to finishing what she and Joe Biden started together?
But experience should prepare us for the opposite. If campaign journalists have taught us anything it’s they’re perfectly capable of turning reality on its head and making Trump’s opponents suffer for his sins. They can make Hillary Clinton an avatar of corruption in a race against a court-sanctioned fraudster; they can make Harris an avatar of inconsistency against a guy who trades policy for cash.
Yep. My only hope is that there is so little time left and the Republicans seem to be so flat-footed that they can’t mount a full-blown “women are so flighty they don’t know what they really believe in” theme out of it. But I won’t be surprised to see it.