Media Gaslighting About Kamala Harris Nears Totalitarian Levels

by Michael Shellenberger

Ever since Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s presumed presidential nominee, the news media have worked to correct what it calls “misinformation” about her. Harris was not a “DEI hire,” they say, meaning Biden did not choose her for his Vice President because she’s a black woman. Harris was never border czar and wasn’t responsible for the quintupling of migrants crossing the border. And, no, say the media, Harris does not support a ban on fracking.

But in the media’s so-called fact-checking, they have spread misinformation. Biden explicitly said he would choose a black woman as Vice President after black Democratic activists and the media urged him to; as such, Harris was indeed a “DEI hire.” The media in 2021 widely referred to Harris as “border czar,” and her responsibilities were to deal with the so-called “root causes of migration.” And Harris had supported a ban on fracking when she ran in the Democratic primary in 2019 and only changed it a few days ago in response to Trump’s attacks.

Of course, there is plenty of misinformation about Harris. Biden never suggested that he lowered his standards to select a black female vice president. Harris never had the formal title of “border czar,” and she endorsed increasing border security recently. And the claims that Harris would shut down or even significantly reduce oil and gas production are contradicted by the expansion of oil and gas under Biden.

But those distinctions do not change the fundamental reality of the position of Harris and the Democratic Party on those three major issues. Harris’ allies waged a pressure campaign based on race and sex in 2020, before Biden picked her as Vice President, and again this year, when Biden anointed her his successor against the opposition of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. Harris never denied she was “border czar” in 2021 and also had responsibility for addressing the causes of the crisis, which she did not do for the last three and a half years. And the fact that Harris didn’t even bother explaining her reversal on fracking proves that it was done for expediency.

As such, the media’s coverage of Harris over the last ten days has been characterized by gaslighting the public about events just a few years old, and suggesting that what we remembered having happened hadn’t really happened. Much of the public remembers very well the pressure on Biden to choose a black female vice president. We remember when the media declared Harris “border czar” responsible for dealing with the “root causes” of migration. And all who can access the Internet can see the videos of Harris saying, at a CNN Town Hall in 2019, “There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking.”

Media gaslighting had increased sharply in the run-up to Biden’s announcement on July 21 that he would not seek reelection. The media’s denial of the reality of Biden’s declining state reached new extremes in June, as Biden froze at a Los Angeles fundraiser and appeared disoriented in at least two instances in Europe. The media repeatedly claimed that Biden was fine and that anyone who said differently was just a Trump supporter spreading misinformation.

The media’s cover-up of Biden’s poor health was a major blow to its credibility, but not enough for it to change its ways. In its coverage of Kamala Harris, the media are now demanding that the public dismiss not just the video and other evidence but also their own memories.

Such gaslighting is a highly risky strategy for the news media, whose business rests upon public trust, which declined from 55% in the year 2000 to just 32% last year. It’s not like the media don’t know their credibility is declining; they wrote about last year’s poll numbers, for example.

And the attempt by some media outlets to explain away their own dismissal of Biden’s poor health reveals that the media are aware to some extent of their bias. A former New York Times Executive Editor said she thought “too many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump. I get that.”

But if displaying an obvious bias while gas-lighting undermines the public’s trust, why do the media keep doing it?

Much of the Democrats’ message is enforced upon editors, reporters, and producers by the Democratic Party and its allied think tanks and activist groups. Perhaps the most important function of liberal and progressive nonprofit groups in Washington, D.C. is to browbeat reporters so they cover stories with a liberal and Democratic bias and demand that reporters who stray from the party line be fired, thereby weaponizing cancel culture for political ends. Media Matters and Center for American Progress are the two most high-profile Democratic Party-aligned groups that do this, but there are dozens or hundreds of others.

To some extent, the media have no choice for business reasons. The reader and revenue base of the mainstream news media are Democrats who have little tolerance for bad news about their party. While most Democrats wanted Biden not to run again, it was striking how intensely many Democrats on X and other social media criticized the media for reporting honestly about Biden’s poor health after his disastrous debate with Trump. When CNN attempted to return to more centrist coverage last year, including inviting Trump in for a Town Hall meeting, the rest of the media, including CNN staff itself, rebelled, demanding that CNN fire its CEO, Chris Licht, which it did in June of last year.

Confirmation bias, ideology, and dogma explain a lot of the gaslighting by the journalists. Journalists and Democrats, when faced with difficult facts about Harris, whether having to deal with why she was hired, the border, or fracking, insist that there are no difficult facts. Psychologists find that when many people experience cognitive dissonance, which results from when lived reality contradicts one’s beliefs, many people more intensely declare their beliefs are somehow correct and frantically look for evidence to support them.

Why, then, do the media keep engaging in gaslighting, even though it undermines its credibility? The simple explanation is that they have to. They are captured by the Democratic Party and its nonprofit industrial complex, by their readers and revenue base, and by their own ideology and psychology.

All of this is a bad sign for America. The institutions we had trusted to accurately report on reality have become propaganda organs to the Party of the establishment and the deep state. It is notable that representatives of the same Party demanded and engaged in mass censorship of disfavored ideas and weaponized America’s legal system to incarcerate their main political rival.

It’s all eerily reminiscent of one of the most famous sentences in George Orwell’s novel, 1984, a warning against totalitarianism. “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears,” wrote Orwell. “It was their final, most essential command.”

If there is hope to be had, it’s in the media’s continuing self-destruction and the rise of social media and podcasting as ways of providing the public with information. In the 1990s and early 2000s, the way to influence politicians was by changing how the media covered an issue. Today, increasingly, politicians change before the media changes, which is an indication of its declining influence. And on hot-button issues like race, the public, even in places like California, frequently opt for non-racial politics, against the insistence by Democrats and the media on racialism.

As such, we can expect public opinion to change, even as the media stays the same. As the public gains access to alternative sources of information, it will understand that Harris changed her mind on fracking for political reasons, was and remains significantly responsible for the border crisis, and was, according to Biden and everyone else at the time, a DEI hire.

LINK