Philip Bump: Media Should Give Kamala ‘Benefit Of The Doubt’

Because the national news media can’t be bothered to actually scrutinize Kamala Harris’ campaign — they’re trying to help her win, after all — they instead choose to scrutinize anyone else who tries.

That’s why rather than sincerely look into Kamala’s relatively new biographical claim that she once slung Happy Meals working at a McDonald’s, The Washington Post’s most willfully obtuse writer, Philip Bump, decided that this week his energy was best spent belittling anyone who questions it — most notably, Kamala’s opponent, Donald Trump.

“Since Trump has been saying that the McDonald’s story isn’t true,” Bump wrote Thursday, “a lot of his supporters are saying it too, rushing to prove that Harris was being dishonest about her McDonald’s employment with the same intellectual rigor that they applied to uncovering voter fraud and pet eating.”

To the extent that Bump had any interest at all in the unsubstantiated “french fries and ice cream” tale Kamala relays to make herself seem humble and relatable, it was to prove that he couldn’t prove whether it’s true even if he wanted to. “Over the course of this week,” he wrote, “I spent some time looking into the story myself — not because I doubted Harris’s claim (since there’s no real reason to doubt it) but because I was curious if it was provable.”

This is what the national media do anytime a Republican or right-leaning news publication raises a legitimate issue that might be politically harmful to voters of the Democrat Party. They dismiss the controversy as a partisan-driven affair of no consequence or otherwise run interference on behalf of Democrats by debating and disputing its merits.

It’s what the media did with the animal-snatching Haitian migrants story. Rather than investigate what Springfield, Ohio, residents had to say of the documented claims that relocated migrants were eating pets and wild animals there, the media busied themselves by asking local government officials if they could prove them. When the media got the answer they wanted — there was no proof — they wiped their hands clean and called anyone still interested liars.

It’s what the media did with the Hunter Biden foreign bribery scheme. Every development of that story, no matter how scandalous, has been brushed aside and regarded as a non-event by the media. Bump leaned into that particularly egregious round of media moral bankruptcy more than anyone. Congressional investigations, testimony under oath, and corroborated reports overwhelmingly indicate that President Biden’s degenerate middle-aged son has for years been financially benefiting from foreign entities to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — for providing no discernible product or service in return except direct access to the U.S. government, including his father. What’s more, there’s convincing evidence that Joe Biden was a key player in the dealings, an assertion made by one of Hunter Biden’s years-long business partners.

Asked last year to reconcile the irrefutable reality that there is at least an interesting possibility of obscene corruption implicating the sitting president of the United States, with the absolute lack of curiosity of the corporate media, Bump yawned.

A sample of Bump’s remarks during that interview with podcaster Noam Dworman:

“You have no evidence that Joe Biden acted on Hunter Biden’s behalf, or that Joe Biden took money!”

“Find me evidence! There is none!”

“You’ve offered no evidence beyond your parsing …”

“This conversation is silly!”

“This is why I keep saying it’s silly!”

To be fair to Bump, he did write in his column this week that he bothered to call up a couple McDonald’s locations in the city Kamala identified for the job. He tried to get the corporate office on the phone but failed in every attempt. That takes at least a few calories of effort, though rather than leave it as an open question as to whether Kamala is being honest about her early life experience, he argued that the exercise was predictably silly because — well, who cares?

“Harris, unlike Trump,” he wrote, “has earned the benefit of the doubt on assertions that may not be immediately provable.”

And just like that, Bump was done with his investment in questioning a story Kamala repeatedly tells as part of her pitch to voters. He’s ready to move on from such things because he knows it’s a problem for the political party he’s trying to help win this election.