On Kamala Harris’s role, media cross border into outright lies

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On Kamala Harris’s role, media cross border into outright lies

Facts are facts, even if they make new presidential candidate Kamala Harris look bad. This fact is undeniable, no matter how much dishonest media try to obfuscate it: President Joe Biden appointed the vice president to stem the tide of migrants to the U.S. southern border. Period. No wiggle room.

And the almost inarguable judgment is that she failed at the job. Miserably. The tide didn’t recede; it rose and crashed in huge waves upon our (figurative) shores.

It was way back on March 24, 2021. Biden, in a White House meeting that included Harris, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, announced he was tapping Harris to lead the administration’s response to the growing number of migrants arriving at the U.S. border. Her job, he said, was “stemming the migration to our southern border.” He also said she “agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with nations [to our South] to accept re- — the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders — at their borders.”

Biden told reporters before the meeting that he wanted Harris to be the point person on the border, to speak decisively for the administration. And in a call to reporters after the announcement, a senior official told reporters unequivocally that Harris’s focus would be on the historic surge of illegal border crossings.

Within hours stories emerged in major news organizations with clarity that “Biden was tasking her with leading efforts to stem migration and the border” with dozens of elite news organizations referring to her as the “border czar.” This is irrefutable history. It’s all documented.


 
Nonetheless, one hour after Biden endorsed Harris last Sunday, news organizations and Democrats were stridently saying it was never the case that Harris was in charge of the border, that they never said she was the border czar and that the claim was all a right-wing conspiracy.

Axios, a popular Washington insider online news organization, not only scrubbed part of its story from 2021 reporting Harris was “appointed by Biden as border czar,” but also said in an editor’s note that it had “incorrectly” labeled Harris a border czar. At least it admitted it originally called her that.

It was one of the most remarkably dishonest moments in American journalism, a once revered industry that in recent years has lost the trust of the people to report the news in a full, fair, and accurate way. And it wasn’t just Axios. The gaslighting of readers across multiple news organizations has been equally repulsive — and it may just be the final straw in that relationship between readers and news organizations.

The New York Times admonished readers Thursday, saying, “Ms. Harris was not in fact appointed border czar, nor was she tasked with addressing the border problems plaguing the border itself.”
 
Simply put they were either lying then or they are lying now.

For years the national press has had what they referred to as “disinformation beats” and used them to rush to say that social media platforms should not feature certain news stories or news outlets, almost all of them center-right or conservative, on their sites.

And now they are engaged in disinformation that discredits their own reporting. They need to call themselves out for disinformation. Either they’re lying now or they were lying then.
 
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