The Fourth Estate Strikes Back: WaPo Head Lets Harris Know the Score

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While I was busy cleaning up my daily emails last Friday evening, a subject line caught my eye: “The times call for serious economic ideas. Harris delivers gimmicks.”

Ouch. It was, to my surprise, from the Washington Post Editorial Board. When I opened it, I saw the subject line repeated as the headline, along with this teaser: “Harris’ most bizarre plan is her proposal to ban “loan sharking,” but that’s just one of many misconceptions.“

Double ouch. I was just a little bit surprised because I was wondering when the mainstream media (MSM) would fire a shot across Kamala Harris’ bow or nail a chicken over her front door.

After all, she has more or less given the media the middle finger as she rode the wave of voter relief and love, allowing her to turn the Democrats’ fortunes around in an instant and take a lead in the preliminary round of what is shaping up to be a “vibes” election.

As president, Joe Biden has been notoriously stingy with press conferences and media access in general, and that hasn’t made him good friends in places with a lot of media attention – the New York Timesfor example. But Harris — who, by popular belief, should have happily involved the press in vetting her and telling her story — has taken the MSM-free campaign concept to an even higher level.

You don’t tell the fourth estate that your people will contact their people. It’s like telling a mafia boss to leave his horses alone, you’ll pay “one of these days.”

In response, a chorus of media and pundits first whispered and then shouted that Harris “necessary“to hold a press conference or two — right now! — so the poobahs of the media world could decide if she was the real deal, tough enough to win their “gotcha” game, and answer all their shouted questions about Donald Trump or why she didn’t apply the 25th Amendment to her ailing boss and then pass all that wisdom on to the voters.

Harris said in so many words, “No, I don’t.”

In fact, she didn’t even bother to say that. She just went about her merry, busy business, building a campaign that didn’t exist a month ago, vetting and choosing a running mate, holding rallies, answering a few random questions between flights, and working via email and social media to reach out to voters, who drank it all in and sent lots of money.

Well, you just don’t do that Doing that! You don’t tell the fourth estate that your people will contact their people. It’s like telling a mafia boss to leave his horses alone, you’ll pay “one of these days”.

If you do that, watch your kneecaps. Of course the After deals in words, not baseball bats or crowbars. Specifically in headswhich is the furthest the vast majority of readers get in forming their impression of the target. In this case, the editorial itself is actually a kind of mixed review, although of course you would never know that from the headline.

The After administration focuses on a speech Harris gave the same day in Raleigh, N.C., in which she detailed her economic policies and priorities and called for building “an opportunity economy.”

Specifically, she proposed eliminating medical debt for millions of Americans; banning overcharges for groceries and food; setting a $2,000 annual cap on prescription drug co-payments; creating a $25,000 subsidy for first-time home buyers; creating a $6,000 tax deduction per child in the first year for families; and raising taxes on the super-rich to cover the significant costs.

Of these proposals, the After The board singled out the prohibition on price inflation as a key issue, comparing it to Richard Nixon’s “failed price controls of the 1970s” and claiming it was “almost immediately met with skepticism.” After citing inflation as “a very real political problem” for Harris, the editors recommended:

One way to deal with this is to be honest with voters and tell them that inflation rose in 2021 largely because the pandemic disrupted supply chains, and that the Federal Reserve’s policies, which the Biden-Harris administration supported, are working to slow it. The vice president instead took a less direct route: blaming big business.

That is to say, forgive the expression, rich. It’s exactly what Biden has been telling voters all along, to what I have to admit are not exactly glowing reviews. Why treat voters “fairly” if voters reward you for it by telling pollsters they trust Trump more on the economy and are at best slow and uninterested in voting for you?

And that’s before you even consider the fact that Harris has a strong point: Much of corporate America — from food to pharmaceuticals, from wholesalers to retailers — has used the pandemic to commit murder. A little pushback — which Trump has promptly idiotically dubbed “Camunism” — might be in order.

And it could be interesting for the After to know that a YouGov poll in May found broad bipartisan support (91 percent among Democrats, 85 percent among Republicans) for a proposal to “ban excessive price increases during emergencies,” along with a proposal to “impose tougher penalties on companies that engage in monopolistic practices” (74 percent and 56 percent, respectively).

So, taking on the corporate loan sharks is Harris’s “gimmick” (singular). What I found most interesting is that from that point on, After editorial changes from neutral to positive, acknowledging that her housing plan is “built on slightly firmer foundations” and praising her “clever tax breaks” to boost construction, while worrying that the first-home buyer subsidy could make matters worse by boosting demand — not exactly a harsh criticism.

And from there the After fills in his scorecard by praising Harris for proposing an increase in the child tax credit, as well as the “earned income tax credit for childless, low-wage ‘frontline workers,’” and an extension of the Affordable Care Act tax credits, which the council cites as “one of the reasons why more than 92 percent of Americans now have health insurance.”

How does a mixed review like this one end up under a heading with the descriptions ‘gimmicks’ (plural), ‘misguided’ and ‘bizarre’? How does a B+ article end up with a big red ‘F’?

In certain cases, we know to take headlines with a grain of salt — they can be hastily concocted by a subordinate who may have read the assigned piece with less than full attention or understanding. It happens. But I would wager that it is highly unlikely if the piece was written by the Editorial Board.

These people know what is coming out under their name. That is why I see the gross disjunction between the mild content of this editorial and the maliciously pejorative banner as a significant one. narrate — perhaps the opening salvo of the media, jealous of their power, firing back at a candidate who dared to defy their demands.

Which naturally raises the question: Are these demands really in the public interest? In asserting its supposed prerogatives, is the media also acting for the public it supposedly serves — or are its concerns more parochial and self-serving?

The country didn’t seem to care much about democracy when Biden was campaigning to preserve it in the face of the threat posed by Trump. So maybe voters don’t, and won’t, care about “doing the right thing for democracy” when it comes to the way Harris is running her campaign?

One commentator, with whom I generally agree, made the argument that Harris’s rejection of the press bad for democracywhich, since I value democracy highly, certainly caught my attention.

But you have to wonder: The country didn’t seem to care much about democracy when Biden was campaigning to preserve it in the face of the threat posed by Trump. So maybe voters don’t, and won’t, care about “doing the right thing for democracy” when it comes to the way Harris is running her campaign?

I mean, ultimately, voters will decide whether to punish Harris if she persists in not giving the media its normal, expected role in running things. A role, we can all agree, that they haven’t exactly been glamorizing since, well, maybe since the 1970s when Rupert Murdoch was the New York Post? (Sidebar: It hasn’t escaped my attention that Jeff Bezos — majority shareholder in mega-retailer Amazon and Whole Foods, both of which could be in Harris’s anti-loan shark crosshairs — owns the Washington Postalthough, unlike Murdoch, general (favorable figures for the fact that he kept his distance from news and opinion.)

Given what those same media did to Bernie Sanders, did to Hillary Clinton, and certainly attempted to do to Biden — and given their incorrigible double standards when it comes to defeating Trump — is it any wonder that, if Team Harris can see a media-lite path to victory, they wouldn’t be in such a hurry to bare their jugular veins to the teeth of that beast? And is it any wonder the media would see her refusal as a shot over the head? are arches?

You can make all sorts of good points about how democracy generally works or should work (one being that the thumbs of fascist billionaires Elon Musk and Timothy Mellon shouldn’t be on the scales), but in this case, the voters, who have seen Harris present herself in the manner of her choosing, have the final say. democratic.

If they don’t like not being fully informed by the establishment press, they can always vote for Trump because he is a master of press conferences.