The Left tends to grade the media's performance based on results. It doesn't matter if you favor the Democrats aggressively if they don't win -- or if the polls seem tied.
Recently, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson was celebrated on "Morning Joe" for writing a column that complained the media was rougher on Vice President Kamala Harris than former President Donald Trump: "Somehow, it is baked into this campaign that Trump is allowed to talk and act like a complete lunatic while Harris has to be perfect in every way."
This argument -- later to be picked up by Michelle Obama and others -- is nowhere close to reality. The legacy media have overwhelmingly favored Harris. On the evening news on ABC, CBS, and NBC, the Media Research Center found that her coverage was 78% positive, and Trump's was 85% negative.
Let's guess that this complaint about how Harris "has to be perfect" reflects the way that liberal journalists and their Democratic allies talk about Harris among themselves. They cannot believe Trump is doing this well, so they have to blame her for not being a perfect political talent.
In their own minds, Trump lives as a cartoon monster, a "complete lunatic." That is reflected in every story and segment that they do. As in 2016, they believe their candidate should be 15 or 20 points ahead.
They hoped for a female Barack Obama, and it's looking like they have a biracial Hillary Clinton.
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One of the blind spots on the Left is always presuming that everything they favor is popular -- or, with enough repetitively positive "reporting," will eventually become so. So, they imagine that everyone will come around to putting boys in girls' sports, or everyone will see the wisdom in flying planeloads of illegal immigrants into small towns.
Oppose them, and you're not wrong. You're a "complete lunatic"; you're racist, xenophobic, homophobic -- you have all the phobias.
What really upsets the "Morning Joe" crew is that Americans are getting their news from other sources and not accepting all their "wisdom." If people are unsure of Harris, much of that is based on her radical left-wing stances. The media don't talk about her sponsoring the "Green New Deal," her stand in favor of "reimagining" taking money away from the police, or her backing a bail fund for violent criminals in Minneapolis after the George Floyd riots.
Even if you run around touting how she's backed away from all or most of these -- her bail fund tweet is still posted -- then you're staring at a picture of an inauthentic candidate just picking her policy prescriptions to win within a Democratic primary. She's plastic, a DEI Barbie.
People can be unsure of Harris based on her political career, where the media have no curiosity about questions like this: If Harris grew up "middle class" with a single mother, where was the father? Was there no child support? The legacy media (especially on television) has displayed zero curiosity on these matters. What happened when she dated Willie Brown at the start of her political career? Zero curiosity.
Most of all, they can't acknowledge that Harris didn't run in the 2024 primaries, so she is an untested candidate. She might seem more "perfect" if she wasn't installed at the last minute. They say she needs to be "reintroduced to the country. " But their reintroduction feels like all celebration and no substance.
This presidential campaign coverage has been so bad that you can't tell the difference between the "news" and the mudslinging 30-second campaign commercials.
Tim Graham is director of media analysis at the Media Research Center and executive editor of the blog NewsBusters.org.
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