a B|E Brief
There’s been quite a bit of hand-wringing from the mainstream media - with Republicans now close behind, in stride, of course - about Vice President Kamala Harris’ perceived lack of willingness to talk to journalists. As a result, we’ve been hearing open demands from primarily mainstream outlets (notice how we’re emphasizing the “mainstream” part) that she immediately begin doing rounds of one-on-one interviews and press conferences with eager journalists.
But, we’re finding ourselves in the midst of the most unusual political climate we’ve experienced in decades. This is definitely the most unprecedented presidential election season in modern times. Harris has, literally, built a national campaign from the ground up in just a month’s time - and has now managed to engineer an average 2 to nearly 3 point lead over her competitor Trump, who daily appears to devolve into a rambling, incoherent fraudster regularly tricking those same mainstream outlets into press interactions packed with pretense. As that unfolds, here’s the latest averaging according to Nate Silver, where she leads by an average 2.4 points …
And here’s the latest 538 averaging, where she leads by an average 2.6 points …
The problem here is that mainstream media, in the process of covering the 2024 presidential election, keeps exhibiting a double standard: more pressure is placed on Harris to reveal detailed policy platforms while rarely following up with Trump on his. We’re also discovering in the past week that three outlets - Politico, Washington Post and the New York Times - each received damning leaks from a source (or sources) inside the Trump campaign … but, they somehow conveniently failed to publish the content of those leaks. This is in astonishing contrast to when they readily and excitedly published leaks about 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s team, rightfully so, is steaming about that …
It’s no surprise that this week has brought about a fair share of PTSD for anyone who worked through the 2016 hack of Clinton’s emails. Eight years ago, every morsel of that data dump was treated as worthy of picking clean through. This time, though, it seems like there is restraint among newsroom leaders and in voters’ appetite to look at dirty laundry.
While Clinton alumni are publicly condemning the theft, they also still blame journalists, in varying measures, for their candidate’s loss eight years ago. As one aide put it, there was never this level of cautiousness on any story when Clinton was the victim of illegal hacks, let alone one with potentially salacious details.
“This double standard is unconscionable,” one veteran of Clinton’s unsuccessful campaign told me. Added another Clinton veteran who spent 2016 screaming into the void about the unfairness of reading the private messages of Clinton and her inner-circle without permission: “Let’s see if we’ve learned any lessons.”
The other issue is that when the Vice President does give a presser to hounding reporters, as she did on August 8th at a Detroit airport, they resort to asking dumb, no-substance questions about things Trump and his running mate said, thereby leading to a Trump campaign talking point dump …
After viewing something like this as a presidential candidate just jumping in to the race a few weeks ago, would you want to do more of these? Analysts keep giving mainstream media outlets leeway by saying they just don’t know how to adapt to these unprecdented political times. But few in that space want to admit to the elephant in the room of media bias, longtime racism, white male paternalism in newsrooms and the oligarchs who rule over all of that.
And, lastly, Vice President is giving interviews. It just depends on how we’re defining “mainstream media” …
So, what’s the problem?