"It's 2020 all over again. As it stands now, another leftist media coverup will decide the election."
-- L. Brent Bozell III, Media Research Center founder and president
A significant new Media Research Center poll finds that large majorities of registered Democrats and Independents who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 — exactly those who would be expected to support Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s contest — are mostly in the dark about many of the controversial and radical positions Harris has taken.
When asked about ten different aspects of Harris’s public record — on issues as varied as her sponsorship of the Green New Deal, abolishing ICE, and eliminating private health insurance — between 71% and 86% of these Democrats and Independents said they either had not heard of Harris’s position or were unsure.
When these voters were asked about where they got most of their news about political elections and candidates, by far the top answers were broadcast television (ABC, CBS and NBC) or cable news (such as CNN and MSNBC). This suggests that the knowledge gaps found by our poll reveal a failure of these outlets to report on radical positions once (and perhaps currently) supported by the now-Democratic nominee for President.
In fact, a detailed Media Research Center examination of ABC, CBS and NBC evening news coverage in the three weeks since Harris became the leading Democratic candidate (July 21 to August 10) shows eight of these ten issues received ZERO attention from these newscasts, while two others received only minor coverage.
This poll was conducted for the Media Research Center by McLaughlin & Associates between August 2 and August 5. The survey consisted of 1,200 people — 800 registered Democrats plus 400 Independents who reported voting for Joe Biden in 2020. Each was asked about where they typically received their political news, as well as their familiarity with a list of left-wing positions taken by Harris.
Each voter reported their top two sources for election news. Just over half (50.2%) listed broadcast television as a main source of news, followed by cable news (41.2%), social media (34.4%), online news sites (23.9%), and search engines (16.7%). A smaller number of respondents listed national newspapers (10.8%), public broadcasting (9.2%), local newspapers (7.6%), radio (4.9%) and AI chatbots (1.0%) as a main source of political information.
But when it came to recalling Harris’s radical record, most of these voters said they were in the dark. Details on media coverage and voter awareness of each of the ten issues we probed:
■ Harris supported cutting funding for the police: Back in June 2020, before she was selected as Biden’s running mate, Harris told a Los Angeles radio show host that she favored cutting police funding. According to ABC News, Harris “told Power 106 Los Angeles host Nick Cannon that she believes ‘we have to redirect resources’ from police to other areas of government, mentioning schools and small businesses.”
“For too long, people have confused achieving public safety with putting more cops on the street,” Harris said in the same interview.
But those watching the ABC, CBS or NBC evening newscasts for information about Harris’s positions have heard nothing about this since the Vice President became the likely Democratic nominee on July 21. And, our poll found, 71% of Democrats and Biden-supporting Independents were unaware or not sure that Harris had ever advocated cutting police funding.
■ Harris co-sponsored the Green New Deal: As a Senator in 2019, Harris was one of the original co-sponsors of the “Green New Deal,” a laundry list of left-wing aspirations focused on the environment and social justice. An economics writer at the time calculated the costs at up to $2.5 trillion a year, a massive expansion of federal spending.
Another economist, The Heritage Foundation’s Nicolas Loris, wrote in 2019 that, if enacted, the Green New Deal would by 2040 cost more than 1.4 million jobs, lead to more than $40,000 in lost income for a typical family of four, and a loss of nearly $4 trillion in U.S. GDP.
Yet since her latest run for the presidency began on July 21, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts haven’t said a word about Harris’s push for the costly Green New Deal. And nearly three-fourths of the Democrats and Independents we polled (73%) were unaware or unsure of Harris’s position.
■ Harris supported the elimination of private health insurance: During her first presidential campaign, Harris advocated a fully government-controlled health insurance program, nicknamed “Medicare for All.” And at a June 2019 candidate debate, she raised her hand when moderator Lester Holt asked the Democrats: “Who here would abolish their private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan?”
Harris later backtracked, telling CBS This Morning the next day that she misheard the question as about “giving up” private insurance rather than “abolishing” it. Harris insisted: “I am in support of Medicare for All,” which would apparently only permit private plans that follow existing Medicare (i.e., government) standards.
A Heritage Foundation paper from 2019 found plans such as “Medicare for All” would leave nearly three-fourths of Americans (73.5%) worse off financially.
Such a radical plan would certainly be worth discussing, but so far ABC, CBS and NBC have been silent about whether Harris would push for such a program if elected. And most of the Democrats and Independents we surveyed (81%) were in the dark about Harris’s past advocacy for Medicare for All, saying they were either unaware or unsure of her position.
■ Harris supported reparations payments to atone for slavery: During her 2019 campaign, Harris joined with other far-left Democratic candidates to support massive payments as a form of “reparations” to the descendants of those enslaved prior to 1865. According to a PBS account, “Harris has proposed monthly payments to qualified citizens of any race in the form of a tax credit.”
While there are various proposals for possible reparations, a CNBC report in 2020 suggested an ultimate price tag of $10 to $12 trillion, or vastly more than the size of the current U.S. federal government budget (on track to surpass $6 trillion in 2024).
Since July 21, the Big Three evening newscasts haven’t said a word about Harris’s past support for reparations. And according to our poll, 71% of the Democrats and Independents we polled were unsure or completely unaware of her position on the issue.
■ As “Border Czar,” Harris never visited a conflict zone on the border: Back on March 24, 2021, President Biden announced he was tapping Harris to “lead our efforts....in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border.” Yet since then, Harris has only visited the border once, and chose not to go to the Rio Grande Valley, the epicenter of the crisis.
Since then, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have reported approximately 8 million border encounters in the Southwest region, revealing the extent to which Harris has failed at her assignment of “stemming the migration.” And her failure to visit the areas hardest hit by the crisis demonstrates a lack of interest in understanding and solving the problem.
Since July 21, the evening newscasts have spent 7 minutes, 46 seconds on the candidates’ positions on immigration, but only 44 seconds on Harris’s failure to visit the border. The only coverage: NBC Nightly News (twice, on both July 21 and July 22) showed clips of Harris lying to anchor Lester Holt in a 2021 interview: “We’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border.”
Holt immediately fact-checked the Vice President: “You haven’t been to the border.”
Flummoxed, Harris argued: “And I haven’t been to Europe...I don’t understand the point that you’re making.”
Apart from that, the network evening newscasts have said nothing about Harris’s failure to visit the worst areas on the southern border. So it’s no surprise that nearly three-fourths (72%) of Democratic and Biden-supporting Independent voters were unaware or unsure of this fact about Harris’s tenure as Biden’s “Border Czar.”
■ Harris said it should not be considered a crime to enter the U.S. illegally. As California’s Attorney General, Harris in 2015 denounced the idea of referring to illegal immigrants as criminals. “I’m a career prosecutor,” Harris told CBSLA. “I’ve personally prosecuted everything from low-level offenses to homicides. Unfortunately, I know what crime looks like. I know what a criminal looks like who’s committing a crime. An undocumented immigrant is not a criminal.”
Given the explosion of illegal migration since 2021, it’s pretty clear that the Biden-Harris administration has decided not to treat undocumented immigrants as criminals. Yet this aspect of Harris’s record has gone unmentioned on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts during the first weeks of Harris’s presidential campaign.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters
Our poll found that Democrats and Biden-supporting Independents are mostly in the dark about this aspect of Harris’s worldview, with 74% either unaware or unsure of this statement.
■ Harris supported abolishing ICE: In a June 24, 2018 interview with MSNBC’s Kasie Hunt, Hunt asked Harris about the “Abolish ICE” signs at a rally Harris had just attended. “Is that a position you agree with?”
Harris made the case: “Listen, I think there’s no question that we’ve got to critically reexamine ICE and its role and the way it is being administered and the work it is doing, and we need to probably think about starting from scratch, because there’s a lot that is wrong with the way that it’s conducting itself. And we need to deal with that....Their mission, I think, is very much in question and has to be reexamined.”
“Starting from scratch” sounds very much like eliminating the agency and starting over, presumably with something a lot more lenient on those trying to evade U.S. immigration laws. Yet since July 21, the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts haven’t once mentioned this past position Harris has taken.
Consequently, our poll showed most (77%) Democrats and Biden-supporting Independents were unsure or completely unaware that Harris had once called for “starting from scratch” when it came to revamping the government’s immigration enforcement agency.
■ Harris promoted a fund to bail out violent protesters during 2020 riots: Back on June 1, 2020, in the wake of the riots over the death of George Floyd, Harris posted a message on both Facebook and Twitter promoting a nonprofit: “If you’re able to, chip in now to the Minnesota Freedom Fund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
Two months later, the local Fox affiliate in Minneapolis reported “among those bailed out by the Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF) is a suspect who shot at police, a woman accused of killing a friend, and a twice convicted sex offender, according to court records reviewed by the FOX 9 Investigators.”
Even as Harris has pitched herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor during her current campaign, the Big Three evening newscasts haven’t said a word about Harris’s past advertisement seeking donations to bail out violent offenders. And our poll found most Democrats and Biden-supporting Independents (78%) had no idea or were unsure that Harris had ever done this.
■ Harris would consider allowing death row inmates to vote: At an April 22, 2019 “town hall” event on CNN, moderator Don Lemon asked Harris if she would want “people who are in — convicted, in prison, like the Boston Marathon bomber, on death row, people who are convicted of sexual assault, they should be allowed to vote?”
Harris would not say “no,” instead replying: “I think we should have that conversation.”
While reporters in recent days have suggested that Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance is an extremist for musing about parents being able to cast additional votes on behalf of their children, ABC, CBS and NBC have been silent about this whopper from Harris five years ago.
And as you might expect, nearly all of the Democratic and Independent voters we surveyed didn’t know anything about it. Only 14% claimed they knew of Harris’s past comment on “having a conversation” about death row inmates voting, vs. 86% who were unaware or unsure of the candidate’s position.
■ Harris was named the most liberal U.S. Senator in 2019: Harris was only in the U.S. Senate for four years, but consistently ranked among the most liberal. In 2019, the nonpartisan research service GovTrack rated Harris as the most liberal of all senators that year. Her lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union is a piddling 4.45%. (For comparison, Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders gets a slightly more pro-conservative score of 6.05%.)
The media used to acknowledge this fact. In a 60 Minutes interview aired October 25, 2020, CBS Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell confronted Harris: “You’re considered the most liberal United States Senator....The nonpartisan GovTrack has rated you the most liberal Senator.” Unfortunately, the GovTrack rating has been scrubbed from the firm’s Web site.
Yet Harris’s outside-the-mainstream beliefs have barely been a topic in coverage of her presidential campaign. There have been 21 evening news stories which have included brief GOP soundbites (mostly Donald Trump and JD Vance) saying Harris is a “radical left” candidate, but the charge has never been explored, let alone documented, by any reporter. Total coverage of Harris’s extremism since July 21: 2 minutes, 57 seconds, all consisting of Republican soundbites.
Consequently, fully 75% of the Democratic and Independent voters we surveyed were unaware or unsure that Harris was the most liberal Senator before she joined the Biden ticket in 2020.
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If our poll had been conducted even as recently as June, voters’ lack of knowledge about Harris might be understandable. But this poll was conducted in August, when the Vice President was receiving the most intense news coverage of her political career. Our study found heavy coverage of Harris on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts during this period: 184 minutes in just 21 days, eclipsing even that of Donald Trump.
Yet our survey of Democratic voters and pro-Biden Independents, who say their top source for news about the campaign are these same networks, shows the damage caused by today’s one-sided news coverage. These voters should be at least familiar with these key points about Harris’s past, even if they don’t agree with conservatives about their significance.
The fact that huge majorities don’t even know about these issues is damning evidence of the media’s selective and partisan approach to covering the 2024 presidential campaign.
