When Reporters Are Just Explainers, Not Investigators

The Left used to pressure reporters trying to be objective by insulting them as “stenographers to power.” You can’t just repeat what the powerful say, they argued. You have to expose them.

Well, some of them.

We remember all the lectures during the Trump presidency that all their anti-Trump aggression was just “holding him accountable.” Holding Democrats accountable isn’t really their bag. You don’t win Pulitzer Prizes for damaging Democrats. That’s not landing on the “right side of history.”

With Democrats, it’s apparently dangerous to explore if they might be failing. It’s better to just repeat their spin. That’s what stood out on “The NPR Politics Podcast” on Sept. 23. It was short—only 11 minutes. The title? “How Kamala Harris incorporates her biography into her campaign message.”

NPR White House reporter Tamara Keith claimed to be struck by Harris hammering on her middle-class childhood: “She said, ‘I come from the middle class. I’ll never forget that I came from the middle class.’ She also talks, as you say, about having a single mother, immigrant parents. She is placing herself in the American story in a way that I think is authentic to her, but also meant to maximize who she appeals to.”

It’s amusing that Harris’ middle-class mantra is “authentic to her.” She doesn’t come across as authentic when she unloads this speech every single time she’s asked about an economic policy.

Worse yet, Keith touted how her campaign sources explain she uses this humble-upbringing line as a contrast with the silver spoon in Donald Trump‘s mouth. Keith even repeated Harris’ claim that she worked at McDonald’s one summer in her college years.

Reporters at the Washington Free Beacon tracked down a 1987 job application that insisted applicants should list all jobs held in the last 10 years. Harris didn’t have McDonald’s on hers. They also found there’s no record of Harris mentioning the McDonald’s job before a labor rally in Las Vegas in June 2019. The job goes unmentioned in both of her memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019.

NPR reporters aren’t investigating this. They merely repeat her life story without investigating it, just as they did for Barack Obama. Nobody investigated his memoirs. They just repeated his tales in admiring tones.

NPR political analyst Domenico Montanaro was impressed with Harris not harping on her gender or race too much, calling it “probably a strong, safe strategy, which makes a lot of sense.” But he said early on, he felt if Harris entered the race, “Trump and Republicans would really struggle in talking about a black woman. And we’ve seen that play out repeatedly, where it really has sort of become a trap for them.”

So, they not only explain the Harris strategy, they praise it, and insist Republicans can’t handle a black woman. Your tax dollars at work.

The podcast ended with NPR reporter Deepa Shivaram throwing racism and sexism into the mix to explain why Harris doesn’t harp on her race or gender: “This isn’t something that she feels like she does have to explain to anyone, let alone the media and largely, like, white reporters who feel the need to ask about this over and over again … . [W]e should point out, Donald Trump does not face these questions, and candidates who are white and male don’t face these questions either.”

No, they face questions about being a racist and sexist who “really struggles in talking about a black woman.” This is why NPR liberals are more excited about Harris’ chances than they were about Joe Biden’s.

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