Majority media and the Harris campaign for president

To the editor:

Very recently, the Virginia-based 501(c) 3 Media Research Center, in operation for some 37 years, conducted a survey associated with the Biden-Harris administration, in the context of elections and the group’s stated purpose, which is as a watchdog organization, focused upon exposing media bias, censorship, corruption and compromise of sound traditional journalistic standards.  Through their president and founder, L. Brent Bozell, the organization just issued a public report on the results of the survey, the sample having been confined to registered Democrat participant voters. The purpose was to determine essentially what those voters did or didn’t know about the public record and political views of VP Kamala Harris. The results were rather stunning in likely anyone’s estimation and would seem to further fuel the developing question as to why Harris had seemingly chosen the“Biden basement strategy”, with exactly zero traditional question and answer press conferences; or, public comment without benefit of a teleprompter in the weeks following her nomination. Further perplexing is the fact that there were no position papers or policy statements posted on her campaign website in the same timeframe.

This approach would appear counterintuitive for one being the supposed leader of the Democrat party and their designated candidate for President. The majority media coverage of the situation had been almost completely dedicated to the political party “vibe train” of “enthusiasm and joy” with virtually no focus on intended policy as would be expected and logically inferred by Harris’s public assertions over time, concerning the following issues: anti-gun buyback mandate, dissolution of the fossil fuel industry, EV mandate by 2030+, stacking the supreme court, no voter ID or signature verification, support for sanctuary cities, softening crime legislation and bail laws, eliminating the electoral college effectively disenfranchising geographic middle America, proposing a constitutionally dubious call for revocation of pharmaceutical patents for perceived corporate pricing excess on prescription drugs, extra-legal “student loan forgiveness” at taxpayer’s expense,  transgender surgery on minors without parental consent; codifying into federal law, abortion on demand as opposed to legislation at the discretion of voters in the individual states; call for socialist regime style price controls disguised as price-gouging legislation; increase of minimum wage, likely to trigger an elevation in layoffs and employer inability to maintain solvency; taxing unrealized capital gains, eliminating the filibuster, etc.

While the survey did not include the multiplicity of Harris policies or political positions outlined above, the following 9 were the focus of the survey that rendered the surprising results; presumably pointing to party political strategy tethered to deficiencies of contemporary majority media in its role as an ostensibly inquisitive and informative press. Whether partisan, negligent or strategically deliberate, the majority media’s habitually self-inflicted behavioral flaw is manifested in multiple “public perception polls” rating the extent to which the media is perceived as a positive public service, revealing it to be firmly situated in a meager percentile range consistently in the low 30s.  According to the MRC survey, the following includes the stated policies about which Democrat voters did or didn’t know:

1. 71% of Dems did not know that Harris supports reparations to atone for slavery which ended in the U.S. nearly 160 years ago.

2. 86% of Dems did not know that Harris supported granting to death row inmates, the right to vote in public elections.

3. 73% of Dems did not know that Harris was co-sponsor of the $90+ trillion Green New Deal, the effect of which is more inflation, a broad scale expansion of government power and regulation, governance-based economy rather than market-based, massive national redistribution of wealth funded by excessive taxation; but, purportedly engineered as a means for its advocate elites to control the weather, change the climate and avert a crisis not firmly established or evident. The alleged crisis is actually characterized by an abysmal history of relentless, but unrealized failed predictions of catastrophic outcomes since the 1960s. Saikat Chakrabarti,  the former chief of staff of New York Congresswoman AOC,  characterized the Green New Deal, stating “the quiet part out loud” at a climate conference (attended by Governor Jay Inslee) in Washington State, according to a Washington Post reporter in attendance, “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? . . . we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”

4. 81% of Dems did not know that Harris supports the elimination of private health insurance as an aside to government controlled “Medicare for all”, including health benefits for millions of illegal immigrants.

5. 71% of Dems did not know that Harris supports defunding the police; using those funds instead for social programs outside of traditional public safety, order  and enforcement of the law.

6. 78% of Dems did not know that Harris was an advocate and spokesperson for the televised public solicitation of monetary donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF), designed to post defendant bonds and cause the release of individuals arrested for criminal activity in the course of the protests and riots in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the summer of 2020. She characterized her stance on the mobs and her solidarity with them, by stating, “They’re not gonna stop . . . They should not stop . . . We’re not gonna stop!”

7. 72% of Dems did not know that as VP and “Border Czar”      or person designated by Joe Biden as responsible for resolution of the border crisis, Harris has never been to any consequential invasion point or “conflict zone” at the border.

8. 76% of Dems did not know that Harris supports the elimination of ICE, which she has publicly compared to the KKK. This would presumably explain why she has had no contact with either of the last two heads of the organization, despite her border responsibilities designated by Joe Biden, whether as “Border Czar”, point person or VP with specified oversight.

9. 74% of Dems did not know Harris is in favor of decriminalizing illegal immigration; thus, rendering an open border and all such immigrants as having equal standing with historically legal immigrants, who followed the law and the codified process toward U.S. citizenship.

While Democrat voters share some of the responsibility due to their own complacency toward being ill-informed, for several years at this point, the majority media has been under scrutiny for demonstrating progressively diminishing concern for their historical commitment to “the public’s right to know”; now, seemingly overtaken by their own ideological standing, partisanship, political bias and advocacy journalism. This of course is reminiscent of the massive collusion and 2020 election interference, associated with the Hunter Biden laptop; a political roose perpetrated upon the American people by the FBI, the Secretary of State, the U.S. Intelligence community, Big-Tech and the majority media, to discredit and censor the sources who had told the truth of the scandal, like the New York Post, while the unscrupulous political collaborators concealed the reality of the contents of the  laptop. The FBI knew it was genuine and had it in their possession since 2019.  

Eventually and without fanfare, the majority media rather quietly came clean months after the election was over,  the media and other participants having achieved their goal, which was underscored in part by political polling, reflecting that approximately 9% of Democrats would’ve voted differently had they known that the laptop information was real and not the product of what had been falsely but repeatedly described by majority media as “a Russian disinformation campaign”. Reportedly, that 9% was enough to have flipped the election in favor of the opposing party. It would now seem that the majority media may be up to its old tricks by downplaying or ignoring the rather fragmented and ambiguous Harris political agenda, while promoting all the  “joyful noise” instead.

Despite the exposure and criticism from competitors and watchdog groups like MRC, with few exceptions, the majority  media has shown virtually no inclination toward or regard for a return to a more professional or even minimally acceptable level of objective journalistic standards.  Absent the motivation to do the right thing for it’s own sake and deliberate indifference to sustained reputational harm, it would seem that the oldest motivation may be the only motivation remaining to push the media toward a more principal-based management of their task: loss of sustaining revenue and the inevitable rise of professionally superior competition to fill the void. Ironically, this is a basic capitalist principle serving to determine the fate of a seemingly ideologically socialist media.

Bud Corbett

Rhinelander