The PBS News Hour’s most partisan reporter, Laura Barron-Lopez, displayed her Democratic favoritism during her long Election Night coverage from Kamala Harris’s election night headquarters. But her pro-Harris hype started before Election Day, with happy talk about Harris’s prospects in most of the swing states, none of which panned out for her campaign.
The day before on the PBS News Hour, Barron-Lopez hyped up a shock Iowa poll with unbelievably pro-Harris findings: “Harris even appears to have a slight lead in decidedly red Iowa. The final Des Moines Register-Mediacom poll shows Harris ahead by three points among Iowa voters.” Oops.
She insisted that a “garbage” joke about Puerto Rico, made at Trump’s rally in Madison Square Garden, was “racist” and bound to offend the half-million Puerto Ricans in Pennsylvania and thus turn the state and perhaps the election to Harris.
On the day before Election Day, Barron-Lopez cited Kamala Harris campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon exuding the same confidence on the same subject.
Barron-Lopez: [Dillon] said that the campaign is still consistently seeing them in the final two weeks breaking for Harris, and she has in the past specifically noted the Madison Square Garden rally and Trump's rhetoric in the final stretch.
On the previous Friday, after lying about what Trump said about Liz Cheney, Barron-Lopez said “That kind of rhetoric from Trump, in addition to his racist Madison Square Garden rally, has battleground voters who only recently made up their minds breaking for Harris by double digits. That's according to a Harris campaign official's accounting of internal data.”
Barron-Lopez certainly put a lot of Puerto Rican votes in the “racist joke” basket. So how did Trump do among Puerto Ricans? Early on Election Night our NewsBusters colleague Jorge Bonilla told us to “Look to Red Osceola” (that’s Osceola County in Central Florida, home to a large number of Puerto Ricans). And indeed, as Fox News reported the next day, Osceola County “voted in favor of Trump on Tuesday night after voting Democrat in the last two elections in which Trump ran.”
Of course, none of Barron-Lopez’s Harris happy talk or Trump doomsaying had basis in fact, as Trump did well among Latinos on his way to not just an Electoral College victory but a popular vote win.
PBS’s Amanpour & Co. (which airs first on CNN International) embarrassed itself on Iowa as well. On the eve of the U.S. election, host journalist Christiane Amanpour led the broadcast by touting that notorious pro-Harris Iowa poll with a headline graphic.
Host Christiane Amanpour: In these final hours in the U.S. presidential campaign, the headlines look a lot like they have all along. But polls suggest a dead even race. But could pollsters be missing a critical voting bloc that could determine the outcome of this election, again? That question lurks behind this bombshell headline from the Des Moines Register: “Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take the lead near election day.” This in ruby red Iowa.
The widely esteemed Iowa pollster, Ann Selzer, says women are driving the late shift toward Democrats. Quote, “Age and gender are the two most dynamic factors that are explaining these numbers,” is what she concludes. And here’s the former first lady Michelle Obama speaking in Michigan, warning that when women lose fundamental rights, men lose as well.
