After the Kamala Harris campaign named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, PBS News Hour anchor Geoff Bennett conducted a cozy interview on Tuesday evening with his Minnesota pal Sen. Amy Klobuchar -- just like NPR did -- and quickly transformed himself into a liberal media cliché.
Bennett: The Trump campaign is already pouncing, calling him dangerously liberal and saying that the Harris/Walz ticket is the most left-wing ticket in American history. He has championed progressive causes. How do you expect that he will defend his record?
“Pounces” is a common media trope suggesting Republicans and cynically or unjustly criticizing Democrats.
Klobuchar repeated her already-tired pseudo-folksy anecdote defending Walz’s authenticity by saying “he's probably the first vice president that has stood in a deer stand in 10-degree Minnesota weather for hours and hours at a time.” A suspiciously specific yet apparently vital qualification.
Harris’s surprise rejection of popular Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro for the VP slot was mentioned, but not Shapiro’s Jewish identification and his willingness to call anti-semitic campus protesters anti-semitic, two traits that made him unpalatable to the party’s hard left.
In an earlier segment Tuesday, co-anchor Amna Nawaz brought on veteran reporter Mary Lahammer of Twin Cities PBS to examine Walz’s record. She tried to trim Walz’s undeniably “progressive” sails (his lifetime American Conservative Union rating as a congressman from 2007 to 2019 was 8.17 out of a possible 100, and he went even further left as a governor).
Amna Nawaz: So, Mary, some folks are hailing his selection here as a nod to progressives of the Democratic Party. But I had a Dem source tell me earlier today that he's actually much more moderate than many in the media make him out to be. What do you make of that?
Her journalist guest did push back.
Mary Lahammer: It depends which office you're talking about. When he was a member of Congress from a rural previously Republican district, he was much more of a moderate. Then, when he became governor for the state and his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, definitely took him in more of a progressive stance. And then he got an all-Democratic legislature, so ended up passing just a very large list of highly progressive items. So, some folks say, was it a bait-and-switch? He originally ran on this concept of One Minnesota. We are still probably rather divided here.
Lahammer relayed some more local criticisms of Walz that PBS may not have wanted to hear:.
Lahammer: ….And folks here are very critical of his time during the pandemic in particular. We had a lot of lockdowns. Of course, we had the riots following George Floyd's murder and were very critical of him being slow to send the National Guard out. Also, during the pandemic, we had the largest fraud in the Feeding Our Future fraud case.
These pro-Walz segments were brought to you in part by Consumer Cellular.
