The MRC's Target Swap

With Joe Biden dropping out, The Media Research Center had to switch its focus of hateful rhetoric to Kamala Harris -- as well as parrot right-wing "border czar" talking points.

Oct 29, 2024

Just as the Media Research Center was angry that nice things were said about President Biden after he withdrew from the presidential race, it was even more outraged that people said nice things about Vice President Kamala Harris as she positioned herself as the Democratic candidate in the days after Biden’s withdrawal:

Clay Waters wrote a July 22 post headlined “Will The New York Times Again Screech ‘Racist and Sexist’ at Kamala’s Critics?” Well, if they’re racist and sexist, why not? Waters offered no evidence they weren’t. The MRC offered more posts in that vein:

Curtis Houck concern-trolled over Harris taking over the nomination without running in a primary in a July 22 post:

On Monday’s CBS Mornings, longtime leftist CBS correspondent and CBS News Streaming Network host John Dickerson defended the Democratic Party giving a middle finger to primary voters and coronating Vice President Kamala Harris without a single vote because, well, at least they didn’t storm the Capitol like Republicans did on January 6, 2021 and claim the 2020 election was rigged.
Co-host and Democratic donor Gayle King might have inadvertently opened the door to the kabuki theatre Democrats will employ now that President Biden has dropped out by saying off the top of the show that Biden’s “surprise announcement yesterday, marks an historic, unprecedented and possibly undemocratic moment in American politics with the election…105 days away”.
Skipping ahead in the first half-hour, co-host Tony Dokoupil hit the nail on the head in a set-up to Dickerson: “Republicans…are already calling this an undemocratic process. You know, Democrats say they’re all about protecting democracy, here they are overturning the will of 14 million primary voters. Do they have a point there?”
Dickerson would only give the GOP “sort of” credit before arguing the parties can set whatever rules they want: “Okay, parties get to pick how they want to pick people. So if Democratic Party decides this is how they want to pick their nominee, they get to choose.”

Houck then whined that Dickerson “pivoted to his usual pompous and smug self by invoking January 6 as a way (albeit as a logical fallacy) to end discussion.” He didn’t explain where, exactly, this “logical fallacy” supposedly was.

Mark Finkelstein complained in a July 24 post that CNN right-wing spinner Scott Jennings was accurately identified as offering spin:

When CNN This Morning host Kasie Hunt brings in a Republican and a Democrat to discuss the campaign, that would be two spins. But at the end of today’s chat with Republican Scott Jennings and Democrat Brad Woodhouse, Hunt raised her arms, and told viewers:
“Scott is giving you spin. That is what they are going to say.”
Hunt stepped in as referee and declared Jennings the loser. Note also Hunt calling Republicans “they.” It’s obvious who the suspicious “they” is in Kasie’s mind!
It’s not enough for the liberal media to extol Kamala Harris to the heavens. They must also devalue and dismiss any attempts by Republicans to make their case against her.

Finkelstein offered no evidence that Jennings wasn’t spinning.

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Alex Christy found a way to bring his comedy cop schtick into things, complaining that a late-night show that focuses on internet memes (which he has previously attacked for making fun of his fellow conservatives) praised Harris for leaning into internet memes:

CBS’s After Midnight is a show that prides itself on being the late night program for the younger, TikTok-watching, meme loving audience. So, naturally, host Taylor Tomlinson went all in on Tuesday with praise for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign’s decision to “embrace the memes.”
After ridiculing middle-aged media personalities trying to explain Gen Z slang, Tomlinson declared that “It’s not a bad idea for the Harris campaign to embrace the memes. That’s how we understand the world and memes. I think when we go into the voting booth, this is what we should see. Right? Not me exercising my civil rights! Slay! Meming and internet culture is great for so many reasons.”
As she was talking, pictures of Harris’s famous “We did it, Joe” video after their 2020 win and Donald Trump looking at the sun during an eclipse were displayed on screen.

When Tomlinson invoked the “brat” meme — “Kamala is brat. And nobody is calling Donald Trump brat. Except maybe every nanny he’s ever had” — Christy huffed in response:

Unfortunately for Tomlinson, while the whole Brat thing may be considered a meme in the original, Richard Dawkins sense of the word, so can the fact that she is a strange person. In the more recent sense of the word, where a meme references a humorous image to make an argument or observation about something, Harris is still tied to the Biden record, and those memes are plentiful.

So memes are good only if they attack Christy’s designated political enemies? Got it.

The ‘border czar’ kerfuffle

The next step in the MRC’s anti-Harris rage: pedantically obsessing over her “border czar” designation — the apparent assigned talking point du jour for July 24. Alex Christy spent a post being angry that fact-checkers pointed out that the title never meant that she was ever in charge of border security:

The nitpickers, who style themselves as fact-checkers at PolitiFact and USA Today, have rushed to Vice President Kamala Harris’s defense by slapping “false” labels on those who seek to label her as the Biden Administration’s “border czar” in order to claim that her failure to stem illegal immigration proves she is unqualified to be president.
On Wednesday, PolitiFact’s Maria Ramirez Uribe gave the Republican National Committee a “mostly-false” rating.
For Uribe, calling Harris the border czar is wrong because “Biden didn’t put Harris in charge of overseeing border security.” Rather, he “said Harris would lead U.S. diplomatic efforts and work with officials in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to stem migration to the U.S.”
Uribe also objected to the “czar” title because “Managing the border ‘has always been’ the Homeland Security secretary’s role, [Migration Policy Institute communications director Michelle] Mittelstadt said.”
Previously, USA Today’s Andre Byik claimed on Tuesday that it is “false” to say “Kamala Harris was ‘put in charge of the border.’”
Byik wrote, “The post exaggerates the vice president’s role in addressing migration at the southern border. Harris was never put in charge of the border or made ‘border czar,’ immigration experts said. President Joe Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s diplomatic efforts addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.”

Case closed, right? Not when there’s a right-wing talking point to perpetuate, and that’s what Christy is being paid to do:

Both Uribe and Byik are trying too hard to be clever. Sure, Harris was never formally appointed border czar, but “czar” has also come to mean “someone in charge of something.” The media, including USA Today, called Mike Pence Donald Trump’s COVID czar despite Pence never formally being given the position and Trump rejecting the idea. Other media outlets even used the term for Harris at the time.
Second, Uribe and Byik want to claim that Harris wasn’t in charge of the border, but the administration’s diplomatic push to address the border surge’s “root causes,” but that is like saying it is false to say a sports general manager is to blame for his team’s bad season because he’s not the coach or the players, he just selects them.
By labeling Harris the “border czar,” conservatives and Republicans are just using the media’s Mike Pence standard, but thanks to PolitiFact and USA Today, such terms could lead to your Facebook post’s getting throttled.

At no point does Christy deny that, title aside, Harris was never in charge of border security. Seems that Christy is the one trying too hard to be clever.

It took both Nicholas Fondacaro and Bill D’Agostino to put together this fit of rage:

Since Vice President Kamala Harris was severely lacking in actual accomplishments from her time in the Biden administration, and was now the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, the liberal media were frantically trying to gaslight Americans on her abysmal record as President Biden’s border czar and sterilize it. In this effort, media outlets such as ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Time, TIME magazine and Axios have taken to lying about Harris’s role in failing to get the crisis at the border under control.
The New York Times was one of the earliest. In an article published on July 17, during the Republican National Convention, titled “Why Republicans Keep Calling Kamala Harris the ‘Border Czar’” reporters Jazmine Ulloa and Nicholas Nehamas huffed, “Republicans at their national convention this week have trained some of their most intense criticism on Vice President Kamala Harris…But perhaps no phrase has been deployed more than this one: ‘border czar.’”
“But Ms. Harris was not, in fact, appointed border czar, nor was she tasked with addressing the broader problems plaguing the border itself,” they falsely suggested. They tried to split hairs by adding: “Rather she was deputized by President Biden with the diplomatic mission of solving the ‘root causes’ of migration from countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, tackling the issues that spur people to flee in the first place, like drug violence and lack of economic opportunity.”
Axios’s framing was arguably the most ridiculous. In a Wednesday article lamenting how “Harris border confusion haunts her new campaign,” reporter Stef W. Kight proclaimed: “The Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had.” She also suggested Harris’s duties didn’t pertain to the border directly and only the “root causes” in Central and South American countries.

But neither writer would concede that border security was never part of Harris’ “czar” designation.

Trim Graham rehashed this deliberately obtuse whining in his July 24 podcast:

In the last day or two, Kamala’s Messaging Police also battled the facts and claimed that she was never appointed to a position called “Border Czar.” Never mind that the “mainstream media” called her that and underlined that Biden appointed her to “stem the tide” of illegal immigration. She failed, so now they’re trying to pretend she had a narrow mission to travel to Guatemala and investigate “root causes” of the influx.
PolitiFact and USA Today‘s fact checkers tried to argue that “Biden didn’t put Harris in charge of overseeing border security,” that this was always the job of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Never mind the 2021 headlines like Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis (Axios.com) and Biden tasks Harris with ‘stemming the migration’ on southern border (NBC News).
You also can’t say the result was “open borders.” They call themselves “independent fact-checkers” but their defensive behavior turns that into a lie. “Fact checkers” are spin spoilers.

Christy returned to play fact-check whataboutism in a July 25 post:

On Wednesday, PolitiFact beclowned itself as it claimed it is “mostly-false” for Republicans to say Vice President Kamala Harris was appointed “border czar.” However, that was not all. Also on Wednesday, PolitiFact tried to attack the party for condemning Democrats for not knowing what a woman is and other “LGBTQ+ talking points” from the Republican National Convention.

Jeffrey Lord dutifully pushed the narrative in his July 27 column:

According to President Biden himself he literally said he appointed Harris “to lead our efforts” on dealing with the border crisis. Say again, he said he was appointing her “to lead.” And, again, the literal dictionary definition of “czar” is “leader.” Which is to say: “to lead.”
The point here is simple.
The liberal media has gone out of its way to mislead Americans about Harris’s role in dealing with the border crisis. Why? Because to acknowledge that Biden did in fact appoint his Vice President “to lead our efforts” on the border – which is to say, to borrow from the literal dictionary definition of the word “czar”- to act as the “border czar”? To admit the obvious is to admit that Harris has failed abysmally at her Biden-assigned job “to lead our efforts” in resolving the border crisis.
Suffice to say the media kerfuffle over referring to Harris as the “border czar” is really a major indicator of the serious lengths the liberal media will go to camouflage the truth of a matter if that truth does not reflect well on the liberal media darling of the moment.
And at this moment, the current liberal media darling is Vice President and soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. She the once upon a time “Border Czar” – leader – per no less than President Joe Biden himself.

A week later, the MRC was still clinging to its deliberately obtuse narrative. Fondacaro huffed in a July 31 post:

After waiting a week, NewsBusters can report that ABC’s The View had finally done the meme and falsely claimed Vice President Kamala Harris (the presumptive Democratic Party nominee) was “never” the border czar. In fact, during Wednesday’s episode, moderator Whoopi Goldberg literally held up a note card and seemingly read the widely spread Democratic Party talking points about “root causes” of migration and the lie that President Biden never appointed her to that role.

The same day, Tom Olohan played gotcha with artificial intelligence over the title:

Meta AI and ChatGPT were willing to tell the truth about Vice President Kamala Harris’s disastrous role as border czar, a stark contrast to the legacy media and so-called fact-checkers aggressively policing any mentions of her role and responsibilities.
According to answers provided to MRC researchers on Wednesday, both chatbots admitted that referring to Harris as “border czar” is appropriate in some contexts. Notably, Meta AI and ChatGPT also agreed that doing so served an important educational purpose and provided clarity to average Americans. ChatGPT called the term a “useful shorthand,” the “essence of Harris’s responsibilities related to migration,” and a “descriptive term used for clarity and emphasis.”
[…]
When asked whether the media should object to Harris being referred to as the border czar, Meta AI offered an immediate negative answer. Meta AI not only suggested that it might be pedantic to reject the term but also nailed the reason that the legacy media objects to the term: “Objecting to its use could be seen as overly pedantic or attempts to control language.”
ChatGPT did not offer a definitive answer to this question. Instead, the chatbot suggested it might be pedantic to try to shut down people referring to Harris as border czar. “Similar informal titles have been used in the past (e.g., “Drug Czar”) without significant controversy. These terms are commonly understood to represent a focus area rather than an official title,” it answered.

As if Olohan and his MRC co-workers aren’t being overly pedantic by pushing a politicized definition of the term on people solely to score points against a political enemy.

The MRC's Target Swap

With Joe Biden dropping out, The Media Research Center had to switch its focus of hateful rhetoric to Kamala Harris -- as well as parrot right-wing "border czar" talking points.

The ‘border czar’ kerfuffle

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