The corporate media is working hard to scrub Vice President Kamala Harris’s history of a negative workplace environment, high staff turnover, and constant staff infighting.
The media published reports for years about Harris’s negative leadership qualities, but now that the Democratic Party coronated Harris as its nominee, media elites appear to be trying to rewrite their reporting.
“A Kamala Harris staff exodus reignites questions about her leadership style — and her future ambitions,” Washington Post reporters Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Tyler Pager penned in 2021. Fast forward to Friday, the Post’s Wootson Jr. and Dan Diamond published a title that seemingly contradicts its opinion of three years ago: “Kamala Harris ran her office like a prosecutor. Not everyone liked that.”
Friday’s article attempts to recast Harris as a leader who underwent important “management style” changes:
But interviews with 33 current and former staffers and allies show that Harris herself — and the team around her — have undergone important changes since the most difficult days of her first year as vice president. These people close to Harris, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of assessing the Democratic nominee’s leadership, say she grew into the role, found policy issues that more closely aligned with her comfort areas and replaced key aides with staffers who responded better to her management style.
In a second example, the New York Times’s Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Katie Rogers, and Peter Baker characterized Harris’s vice presidency as “struggling,” a “political liability” and “disastrous” in an article from 2023 titled “Kamala Harris Is Trying to Define Her Vice Presidency. Even Her Allies Are Tired of Waiting.”
By August 2024, after Harris became the Democrat Party’s nominee, Kanno-Youngs and Baker wrote Harris’s vice presidency in a better light. They dubbed Harris’s record as “complex” in an article titled, “A Vice Presidential Learning Curve: How Kamala Harris Picked Her Shots.”
Kanno-Youngs and Baker elaborated on Harris’s “complex” record of being the first “Black woman” to be vice president:
A Learning Curve
Being vice president is one of the trickiest jobs in Washington. It comes with a nice blue-and-white plane, a lovely mansion and a decent office in the West Wing, but nothing is guaranteed. The old saw is that there are only two job requirements for the vice president in the Constitution — presiding over the Senate and checking to see how the president is feeling each morning. As Walter F. Mondale famously put it, the vice president essentially is “standby equipment.”
Its only real power is derivative, depending entirely on the whim of the president and the skill of a vice president to find openings to make oneself relevant without crossing the boss. The challenge for Ms. Harris was especially pronounced because she was flowing against the historical tide.
…
He noted that a lot of people assumed she was vice president only because she was a Black woman, a perception that was unfair but hard to shake. “They didn’t give her time to learn or room to grow,” Mr. Clyburn said. “That was the problem.”
Media critics picked up on the media’s change in attitude toward Harris. “This is just the latest example of how the same reporters and institutions that debased themselves covering for Joe Biden’s obvious mental decline are now debasing themselves to reinvent Kamala Harris’s long record of incompetence and failure,” said Alberto E. Martinez, Sen. Marco Rubio’s (R-FL) former chief of staff.
WATCH — Lawler: “Kamala Harris’s Policies Will Put Us into a Recession, There’s No Question About That”:
The media bias underscores why six out of ten Americans say the establishment media are to blame for misinformation, according to a 2023 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research survey. Only 16 percent say they are very confident the media report the news fully and fairly. Forty-five percent told the pollster they have little to no confidence at all.
Americans also blame the establishment media for political polarization. About three out of four Americans say the media are responsible for the polarization, and just under half of those sampled have little to no trust in the media’s accuracy or fairness in reporting.
Since Harris joined the presidential race, media elites provided Harris with 84 percent “positive coverage,” a Media Research Center study found in August, while it produced 89 percent negative coverage of former President Donald Trump.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
