Press Arrogance Confessed

The AP has confessed press arrogance, even though it likely didn’t intend its statement to be that. In David Bauder’s article concerning journalist efforts to downplay Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ ducking interviews at every opportunity, Brauder wrote

[F]or journalists, the larger lesson is that their role as presidential gatekeepers is probably diminishing forever.

Bauder then cited Republican communications strategist Kevin Madden:

For the teams behind candidates, “the goal is to control the message as much as possible[.]”

Of course. They’re wresting that control away from an intrinsically mendacious guild.

Gatekeepers. Because men of the journalist guild Know Better what us average Americans should know about the political doings in our nation. These Wonders presume to censor gatekeep that information, to decide for us what we should hear and how we should understand what we hear, and they’re distressed that there are so many other means through which politicians talk to us.

Yes and No

The Wall Street Journal‘s editors opened one of their Friday editorials with this:

On taxes and spending, he [Minnesota Progressive-Democrat Governor and Progressive-Democratic Party Vice President nominee-in-waiting Tim Walz] has sought to outdo California progressives and is making Illinois look like a model of fiscal discipline.
Ms Harris is slipstreaming behind the Biden Administration policies and refusing to lay out her own policy agenda. This makes Mr Walz’s record as Governor over the last six years all the more revealing as a window on the duo’s plans for the country.

It’s certainly true that Walz’s behavior as governor is demonstrative. It is, though, not entirely “all the more revealing” of a Harris-Walz profligate tax and more profligate spend policy, should they get elected. The editors make that clear in their own words, for all that they seem not to recognize that: Ms Harris is slipstreaming behind the Biden Administration policies.

Harris is not at all “refusing to lay out her own policy agenda.” The Biden-Harris policies are precisely the policies she’s intent on continuing, and that extends far beyond economics. Harris, and Walz beside her, are intent on continuing the Biden-Harris open borders policy, and they’re intent on continuing the Biden-Harris policy of speaking loudly while carrying no stick at all regarding our nation’s most dangerous enemies, Russia, the People’s Republic of China, and Iran.

Harris’ slipstreaming is her statement, if not in so many words, of the policies she intends to pursue in a Harris-Walz administration.