The bar for what passes for “journalism” at the Cable News Network is low these days. However, the network still manages to find ways to stoop to new lows. Case in point, an entire segment defending Kamala Harris’s accent use and authenticity, while completely neglecting her totally made-up Hispanic accent.
Here’s how host Laura Coates opened her segment in defense of Harris’s “code-switching”:
CNN LAURA COATES LIVE
9/18/24
11:14 PM
LAURA COATES: All right. tonight’s take comes to us from Elizabeth Spears from The New York Times, who writes this headline: “The Real Reason the Harris Twang Is Driving Republicans Crazy.” Now, in this piece, she argues: “conservatives find her accent infuriating for one very specific reason: because they buy the negative stereotypes. They associate southern accents with less educated working class people who, if they're white, might be racist- and that’s a demographic the conservatives cynically regard as their property.” Unquote. Now Republicans pounce each time she seems to change the way she talks based on her audience. Here she is talking about the same topic on the same day. But in the first clip, she's in Detroit. The second: Pittsburgh.
KAMALA HARRIS (IN DETROIT): You may not be a union member. You better thank a union member. For the five-day work week. You better thank a union member for sick leave. You better thank a union member for paid leave. You better thank a union member for vacation time.
KAMALA HARRIS (IN PITTSBURGH): Thank union members for sick leave. Thank unions for paid family leave. Thank unions for your vacation time.
COATES: Now conservatives would look at this difference in her cadence, in her delivery, and they would point to what they think is evidence of Harris’s lack of authenticity.
I will note that the NYT portion read by Coates is an exercise in liberal, or perhaps illiberal, projection what with its assessment of the southern accent. The rest of the segment, another 8 minutes or so with former Harris comms director Jamal Simmons and political historian/CNN contributor Leah Wright Rigueur, served as a defense of Harris’s authenticity, of her deployment of accents depending on the occasion, and on dismissing attacks of this practice as proof evident of racism.
To be clear, I’m not going to get into an extended dissertation on code switching here except to state my belief that persons who engage in this practice are not necessarily inauthentic. My issue with this segment is that it was produced and aired with zero mention of the fact that Harris, while addressing the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s Hispanic Heritage Month event, completely fabricated a Hispanic accent:
JUST IN: Vice President Kamala Harris reveals her new "Latina" accent for the first time.
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) September 18, 2024
Harris has pulled out multiple accents on the campaign trail however this one is one of the most interesting to date.
Harris pulled out the accent while speaking to the Congressional… pic.twitter.com/JLh5mSF6qj
Harris’s fake Hispanic accent blows the entire premise of the CNN segment out of the water. To run it anyway, despite clear evidence of a code switch beyond Harris’s normal scope that has been widely and rightfully mocked as proof evident of chameleonic inauthenticity, leaves reasonable viewers to conclude that CNN is far less interested in exploring the subtleties of cross-racial communications than in covering for the Regime. As per the custom of Regime Media.
