The documentary series Frontline on tax-funded PBS issued its latest quadrennial documentary on the two major candidates running for president: “The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump.”
Producer Michael Kirk told Forbes magazine he and his team worked "to balance out the screen time for each of their subjects.” Kirk also told Forbes it was "really hard" to fight the impulse to put his "thumb on the scale in some way." Kirk may have passed the first test of balanced screen time, but failed hard on not putting a partisan thumb on the scale.
In typical Frontline fashion, the emphasis was heavy on curated clips of interviewees, with only brief off-screen narration by the program’s veteran, Will Lyman. The summary verdict? Trump is a fraud, Harris is a barrier-breaker.
Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose interview was spliced into several places, was the sole defender of Donald Trump, while Trump’s many hostile biographers (and to be fair, former staff like former campaign manager Brad Parscale, who admitted Trump’s misplaced braggadocio on COVID hurt Trump) abounded.
The dominant litany of hostility included niece Mary Trump, Washington Post reporter and Trump biographer Marc Fisher, liberal hacks like The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, and ABC reporter Jonathan Karl, who superfluously used Trump Tower as a metaphor for Trump himself. “The rules don't apply to him. Even the number of floors in Trump Tower is essentially a fraud. From the lower floors, he skips a bunch of numbers so that it has more floors than any other building of the same height.” Biographer Fisher repeated his line from his 2020 “Choice” appearance on Trump ruling his military school dorm with an “iron fist.”
Whether by circumstance or design, no one from Trump’s conservative-media fan base was granted screen time.
By contrast, when picking out voices to flesh out Kamala Harris, Kirk and his interlocutors often relied on sympathetic journalists from both leftist and so-called mainstream publications, especially Jamilah King of Mother Jones and Courtney Subramanian of the Los Angeles Times.
Give Frontline one cheer for devoting a few minutes to a subject the media has been eager to avoid: Harris’s romantic and political relationship with “a powerful mentor, one she’s tried not to talk about,” powerful California politician Willie Brown, 30 years her senior. Frontline even included a 1995 Prime Time Live (ABC) clip of Brown and Harris at a social event, with a reporter asking a surely mortified Harris: “Excuse me, are you his daughter?”
But even then, Frontline managed to turn the embarrassment into a sexist attack on Harris, courtesy of advisor Ace Smith: “If you're one woman running for office, the rules have been written by men for over 2,000 years, and you will have to work twice as hard, and you will be judged twice as harshly.”
Fisher described Trump’s “litany of failure,” including a string of business bankruptcies and stiffing contractors. Meanwhile, Harris was integrating every space she went, as former campaign manager Brian Brokaw said: “She's always been the first person to integrate this little boys' club, as a woman and as a black woman. Being that first has to be incredibly lonely.”
The program aired the misleading, truncated version of Trump’s quote on the notorious march in Charlottesville over the removal of Confederate War memorial statues, about there being “very fine people, on both sides.” Trump went on to say that “I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.”
After all the history of Harris's left-wing Berkley/San Francisco background, an LA Times reporter insisted “she’s not an ideological person.”
Frontline covered Harris’s failed first mission as VP, going to Guatemala to warn Central American migrants not to attempt the journey, then returning to America to make a disastrously defensive interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, which an Atlantic reporter called a “catastrophic viewing experience." But Frontline again rescued Harris with an old friend’s defense: “It's sort of what happens in Washington, especially when you're a woman. If you have a misstep, people hyperfocus on it.”
Mother Jones’ King offered extended praise: “She seems to be perfectly positioned for this moment....being this biracial kid in Berkeley, or being the new kid in Montreal, or being the new person on Howard University's campus, or being this lone black woman in the room in San Francisco -- all of those things are coming to a head and proving themselves useful in this moment.”
The narrator concluded: “Now, two presidential candidates waging their biggest fights yet. For Donald Trump, one final chance to go out the winner he's always sought to be, to deliver for the millions of Americans who put their faith in him. For Kamala Harris, a sudden chance to break the ultimate barrier, to bring her sense of justice and change to American politics….”
