NPR hasn't reported on the scandal of Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis potentially ruining her election-interference case against Donald Trump by having an affair with her married special prosecutor, who took her on vacations with the money she was paying him. No, they were too busy sounding like State-Run Radio on Thursday night by offering a four-minute press release for Vice President Kamala Harris, who's now "taking a more front-and-center role on addressing gun violence" on the campaign trail.
The closest thing to negativity was anchor Juana Summers noting Harris is trying to "court younger voters, who, right now, aren't showing a lot of enthusiasm about voting for President Biden."
Reporter Deepa Shivaram considered no one but Harris and other Democrats on the ridiculously titled All Things Considered. Kamala spoke to mayors in downtown Washington:
KAMALA HARRIS: I know what guns do and gun violence does to the human body. For so many of you, you, too, know what gun violence does to people, to a community, to families, to the psyche of a community.
DEEPA SHIVARAM: Last fall, when President Biden created the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, he tapped Harris to take charge. It's an issue that has taken her around the country to meet with advocates and survivors, too, like at this event last week at a middle school in North Carolina.
HARRIS: When I was speaking with these young leaders, before I walked in here, they were talking about, hey, shouldn't we be looking at people's backgrounds before they can buy a gun? Yes, young leaders, I said to them. You are absolutely right.
SHIVARAM: Harris consistently points to Congress to pass an assault weapons ban and expand background checks, but she's also been highlighting what the White House has been doing on its own, like executive actions on gun control and providing funds for mental health counselors in schools. The VP's team says these events will happen more as Harris travels on the campaign trail, where she's been specifically trying to drum up support among younger voters and voters of color.
EVE LEVENSON: The more that she's out there talking and connecting to these folks, it also, I think, only earns her credibility.
SHIVARAM: That's Eve Levenson, who was recently named to the Biden campaign team. Her job is to get young voters excited about Biden. She says the campaign is framing this issue, and related issues, as being about freedom - freedom from violence and freedom to be safe.
LEVENSON: That is what young people want, is to be able to have that freedom and to be able to have a government that's supporting them, but not constraining them.
Then they turned to another Democrat, Ryan Barto of the the gun-control group March For Our Lives, created after the Parkland school shooting, before closing with a Democrat pollster:
SHIVARAM: John Della Volpe at Harvard conducts polls of young people and has previously worked with the Biden campaign. He says, for young voters, the focus is on human rights.
JOHN DELLA VOLPE: It's really about wrapping everything together in terms of a set of values. And that's what young people vote. They're values-based voters, not transactional voters.
SHIVARAM: Della Volpe has watched how Harris has been connecting with younger voters, like during recent stops at college campuses. He says her approach is working.
The whole thing could put you to sleep, it's so robotic. Shivaram's last job was as a campaign embed following Kamala around for NBC News in the last cycle. But after a story like this, you could wonder if she was a Biden-Harris campaign operative embedded with NPR for this election.
Listen below:
