Vice President Kamala Harris’ deputy campaign manager admitted there is zero value in Democrats talking to outlets like The New York Times (NYT) and The Washington Post (WaPo) because those outlets are already in the tank for the party.
Rob Flaherty told Semafor’s Max Tani that the Harris campaign decided to skip interviews with major corporate press outlets because data showed readers of outlets like the NYT and WaPo already supported Harris.
“There’s just no value — with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press — in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us,” Flaherty said.
You don’t say?
The propaganda press went to great lengths to try and drag a subpar candidate like Harris across the finish line. So of course readers of The Times or WaPo were “already with” Harris — the information they’re ingesting gives them no other choice.
Take for example this October headline from The Times: “Trump Bobs His Head to Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour. ” Or this WaPo headline: “Trump sways and bops to music for 39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode.”
Both headlines were sensational — a presidential candidate who randomly stops during a town hall to dance. The only problem was that the headlines were entirely fabricated. Then-candidate Donald Trump paused his October Pennsylvania town hall after a pair of medical emergencies occurred in the crowd, with Trump waiting until emergency officials had taken care of the situation before resuming the town hall.
Then there was the propaganda press’ cover-up of the massive plagiarism scandal in which the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo reported that a 2009 book co-authored by Harris contained several passages that appear to have come from other websites and published works. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood explained, “In an effort to run damage control for Harris’ flailing campaign, the anti-speech New York Times dispatched three ‘journalists’ to pen an article aimed at undercutting Rufo’s reporting.”
For a scandal this big, The Times went with the headline: “Conservative Activist Seizes on Passages From Harris Book.” A quick glance from the headline would never indicate to readers that Harris was involved in such a scandal — which is exactly why the headline was written as such. (The Times later admits in its reporting that passages cited by Rufo “appeared to have been taken partly from other published work without quotation marks.”).
No loyal reader of either outlet could have had a different outcome of opinion other than “Kamala is the only choice for president” because they were being spoon-fed propaganda.
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And yet despite the left-wing press’ best efforts, Harris still lost. Certainly their coverage only helped Harris — but it was not enough to drag her across the finish line. Flaherty himself admitted just that, saying while Democrats have long been in cahoots with the media — the Harris campaign failed to use independent and nontraditional outlets to spread their message at a time when the masses are shifting away from the left-wing corporate press.
“Democrats have historically had these really close relationships with institutional media, institutional culture — Hollywood and the traditional press. There’s this entire cultural ecosystem that the Trump campaign did a really good job of cultivating over a long period of time,” he said.
Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance, for example, both sat down for separate interviews with podcaster Joe Rogan. Meanwhile, Harris declined to sit down for a full interview with Rogan over reported concerns of leftist backlash.
But Harris wouldn’t have needed to do the Rogan podcast or other non-traditional outlets if the corporate press wasn’t so obviously biased. If the left-wing media stopped acting as the propaganda wing of the Democrat Party and instead started acting like journalists and truth-tellers, they wouldn’t have lost the trust of millions of Americans. But as Flaherty admits, The Times and WaPo aren’t in the business of truth-telling, they’re just the propaganda arm of the Democrat Party.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
Jesus Christ is King
