The Media’s Transformation of Kamala Harris

The reinvention of Kamala Harris requires a suspension of disbelief that only Hollywood and its kissing cousin corporate media could deliver. 

Is it any wonder that the same marketing team that insisted President Joe Biden wasn’t slipping into cognitive applesauce before our very eyes is now demanding that we believe his grossly incompetent vice president is up to the job of leading the free world? The same accomplice media that insists men can have babies, all white people are inherently racist, and “from the river to the sea” isn’t a rallying cry for genocide are selling us another bad bill of goods on Kamala Harris. 

The Joker is now Captain America, for Christ’s sake. 

The same media that has suggested that former President Donald Trump is to blame for nearly being assassinated is the same media now doing damage control for Kamala Harris.

Arguably, it’s the accomplice media’s rewrite regarding this paint-by-numbers presidential candidate’s “work” on the border crisis that might just be the most alarming. 

The ‘Border Czar’ That Suddenly Wasn’t

As my colleague Jordan Boyd wrote this week, the usual suspects are now insisting that Biden didn’t make Harris “border czar” after reporting for years that Biden made Harris border czar. Case in point, the fine journalists(?) at Axios. 

Corporate media outlets wagged their collective finger at Republicans for audaciously claiming that Biden, who created the open border debacle currently devouring America, put his feckless VP in charge of finding solutions to the mess of the administration’s making. The Wall Street Journal led the charge in painting Harris a “convenient scapegoat” of Republican rancor, not only insisting that the vice president’s role was much narrower than had been routinely reported, but that she has acquitted herself nicely by announcing that Pepsi and Nestle would make investments in Central America. 

WT actual F! Talk about your Hollywood makeover. 

But Axios took the cake, asserting in an X post that Harris never actually had the job. 

“The outlet’s complaints that the Trump campaign and Republicans like House GOP Chair Elise Stefanik have unfairly labeled Harris’ role, however, fall short in the face of its own reporting, which repeatedly referred to Harris as Biden’s border czar,” Boyd writes. Caught in its own crap, Axios added an editor’s note to the original reporting, offering a late mea culpa that it “was among the news outlets that incorrectly labeled Harris a ‘border czar.’” 

Why, pray tell, did Axios make this quick change this week of all weeks? We ask the cross-examining attorney’s question, of course, an answer clear to any mind still capable of reason. 

Axios wasn’t interested in that question, however. The publication did not respond to my request for comment, sent Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what I asked:

Can someone from Axios comment on why the publication suddenly has changed its narrative on Vice President Kamala Harris’ role regarding border/immigration issues, particularly the identification of the VP as “border czar”? As noted, Axios has described Harris as “border czar” in at least one previous report. It seems Axios and other media outlets are attempting to distance the vice president from what clearly has been a failed initiative. Why is that?  

Radio silence. 

Unbelievable

But let’s be honest. The mainstream image consultants have their work cut out for them. It’s no easy feat covering for a vacuous presidential candidate who chooses campaigning at a sorority over meeting with the prime minister of a nation that saw more than 1,000 of its citizens, raped, tortured, murdered and desecrated by terrorists. Still, something tells me the same accomplice media that has reinvented Hamas as “freedom fighters” is up to the challenge of reinventing Harris. 

But here’s the problem: American voters aren’t buying Kamala’s makeover. At least not yet. An MSNBC focus group of Wisconsin women interviewed in the wake of Harris’ campaign stop in the critical swing state had some damning things to say about the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential candidate. 

One voter told MSNBC’s Elise Jordan that Harris is worse than Biden, who has hit basement level popularity ratings. “She doesn’t even know what’s going on at the border and that’s what she was supposed to be doing and in charge of,” the voter said.   

“I think she’s an idiot,” said Mary, one of the women interviewed. “Because she hasn’t done anything in the time that she’s had. We don’t know anything about her as far as her three years so far in the White House. She’s not real smart.”

Would the real Kamala Harris please stand up? She has, and Mary knows it. 

Here’s the sad exclamation point to this rebuild: If the U.S. Secret Service had devoted as much attention to protecting the GOP’s presidential candidate as the corporate media have in protecting the image of the Democrats’ candidate, former President Donald Trump wouldn’t have been shot in the face, two rallygoers wouldn’t be recovering from critical injuries, and one very brave American would be alive and at home with his family. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.