For a brief shining 24 days — June 27 to July 21, to be specific — it looked like something had fundamentally changed on the American media landscape.
Beginning with the debate that led to Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, there seemed to be new, green shoots of skepticism in the media’s questions, and there was appropriate soul searching about the press’s complicity in concealing the president’s condition. It was news when the White House press corps played hardball with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre. And Fox News senior correspondent Peter Doocy, whose style of questioning has been described as “pointed and at times heated,” was suddenly starting to seem like one of the cool kids, not the token conservative reporter always sparring for a fight.
The attempted assassination of Donald Trump also seemed to mute the omnipresent drumbeat that Trump is a real and present danger to American democracy — the favorite storyline of the political left.
Then Kamala Harris emerged as Biden’s successor. And after the brief intermission, the pro-Democrat programming returned at warp speed, with an avalanche of stories extolling her experience as a prosecutor, her “close-knit” relationship with her stepchildren, her loyalty to Biden, and even her “joyful” and “charismatic” laugh, to name but a few. Perhaps the most cloying was the essay in The Washington Post that compared listening to Harris laugh to listening to music.
To be fair, it’s hard to separate voters’ enthusiasm for Harris from the media’s enthusiasm for Harris. They are symbiotic and exist in an media ecosystem that regards anyone enthusiastic about Donald Trump as dangerous or dim-witted — or in the new, trendy lingo of Democrats, “weird.”
That’s not to say that the celebration over Harris isn’t genuine, and that she won’t prove to be an effective candidate for her party. Utah Sen. Mike Lee cautioned this week that Harris should not be underestimated, noting that “Republicans would make a huge mistake by discounting her.”
Even the conservative news site The Dispatch has said that “Kamala Harris energizes weary Democrats.” She’s polling better than Biden did against Trump, and there’s a sense among some Republicans that, when it came to relentlessly pounding Biden for his struggles, they’re like the dog that finally caught the car and realized maybe that wasn’t such a great idea, after all.
Not so the press, which seems energized by the month of delayed-onset reporting on Biden’s condition, and triumphant about the ascendance of Harris as the Democratic standard-bearer, a promotion that came about with dizzying speed without a single vote cast.
Consider The New York Times editorial calling for Biden to step down, which landed the day after the Trump-Biden debate. The nation’s most influential media outlet set off the slow avalanche toward changing the Democratic Party ticket. Being first, the Times allowed others to go all in for change, the president’s fury notwithstanding.
New York magazine was exuberant, with a cover that showed Harris sitting atop a coconut with the headline “Welcome to Kamalot,” harkening to the rosy “Camelot” characterization of the John F. Kennedy presidency, an image famously crafted by JFK’s widow.
There, of course, has never been a glowing reference to “Donalot.”
Instead, there has been a spate of articles taking off on Democrats’ calculated talking points about Trump and his running mate JD Vance being “weird.” The “weird” designation — also part of the broadcast media onslaught — has since been expanded to include some of Trump’s supporters. Many of the pieces are opinion columns, but some are news articles that purport to explain why weirdness is suddenly in the news. The effect is the same: The Democrats’ talking point gets out in the world at zero cost, as in the Chicago Tribune piece headlined “Harris and Democrats keep calling Trump ‘weird’ — Here’s why.”
In Politico, there was a headline about Harris’s past position on fracking that was framed as a “Trump accusation.” After outcry, the headline was changed, per Fox News.
It’s hard to convince Republicans that this is not a coordinated media effort, similar to what was seen as a coordinated media effort to protect Biden earlier in the year.
To be sure, separate newsrooms produce the stories, but each is chasing the same “save democracy at all costs” storyline. Consider the headline on The Atlantic’s lead story Tuesday: “What’s Genuinely Weird About the Online Right.” Or Vanity Fair’s lead story: “All of the Crazy Things Trump Said to a Roomful of Black Journalists.”
Fox hosts, meanwhile, are pouncing on what they call the “rebranding” of Kamala Harris via the media, with anchor Trace Gallagher and longtime host Sean Hannity both doing segments pointing out what they see as sycophantic coverage.
Kayleigh McEnany, a former press secretary for Trump who is now a Fox commentator and co-host of the show “Outnumbered,” foresaw the “Kamalot” frenzy days before the New York magazine cover debuted. She was tweeting about it the day Biden dropped out, after she saw Jamal Simmons, Harris’ former communications director, say on CNN that little girls see Harris like a real-life “Wonder Woman.”
Earlier today, she told me that it’s strange that legacy newspapers aren’t writing critically about Harris’ association with Biden, whose unfavorable ratings helped drive the campaign to get him to step down, or the voting record that once got Harris named the most liberal U.S. senator. It’s a fair question. “As the vice president, she owns this administration’s agenda and failures on any issue,” Kamy Akhavan, executive director of the University of Southern California Dornsife Center for the Political Future, told the Sacramento Bee.
There have been a few articles examining Harris’ record, McEnany said, including ABC’s report on Harris’ remarks about police defunding after George Floyd’s death, and The New York Times article entitled “Why the Kamala Harris of Four Years Ago Could Haunt Her in 2024.” But Harris seems to be escaping the kinds of questions that Biden was getting a few weeks ago under heightened press scrutiny.
“Where is the press clamoring for Kamala’s first press conference? Where’s the press clamoring for her first serious sit-down interview? We’ve seen a revamped Kamala Harris, someone who performs much better on the rally stage than she did a year ago, someone who in general seems to have perfected her ability to speak in front of cameras, but where’s the clamoring for an unscripted moment? ... I’m waiting for the clamoring from the media. It’s in their interest to have her do a free-wheeling sit-down or a free-wheeling press conference,” McEnany said.
She said that positive articles published about Harris and her campaign have a measurable effect that can be seen in public polling. “Look at her favorability prior to becoming the de facto nominee, and look at her favorability after. It’s a perfect example of the power of the media.”
In December of last year, 39% of voters had a positive view of Harris, compared to 55% who viewed her unfavorably, a Los Angeles Times poll showed. “According to this review, Harris hasn’t recorded a positive net approval rating since June 2021 and is notably less popular than Mike Pence, Biden, Dick Cheney and Al Gore were after the same number of days as vice president. The analysis also found Harris has an even worse approval rating than President Biden, who scored two points better with a net rating of -14,” Newsweek reported in December of 2023.
This week, Newsweek reported that Harris’ approval rating has surged: “An ABC News/Ipsos survey of 1,200 adults released on Sunday showed that Harris’ favorability rating stands at 43 percent, 8 points up from the 35 percent favorability rating she recorded in a previous poll conducted before President Joe Biden ended his 2024 campaign.”
Harris, on her own terms, is one thing. “Kamala plus media” is quite another, McEnany said.
She’s not wrong.