Here's the Real Reason Harris Won't Hold News Conferences

It's going on 45 days since Vice President Kamala Harris last held a news conference with journalists, and speculation is rampant about how much longer she will go before convening another such gathering.

Here's my suggestion: She won't.

Or if she ever does, such gatherings will be few and far between.

Harris watched President Joe Biden all but ignore the White House press corps for more than three years. When he did deign to stand in front of the journalists to take a series of well-scripted questions, doing so invariably drew attention to his waning cognitive abilities.

But here's the overlooked fact that is even more significant than the spotlight that shone on Biden's decline during news conferences: rarely was he ever asked a challenging question by any of the assembled journalists other than Fox News' Peter Doocy. And even rarer were the tough follow-ups that are essential to getting some semblance of the truth out of most politicians. More often, the questions have tended to be softballs that suggest most of the journalists present are sympathetic to the Biden-Harris administration.

What's the lesson here that Harris and Democrats are likely drawing? Ignoring the national media is a no-downside proposition for them because, for the most part, the Mainstream Media is in their pockets.

It's not news that most journalists tend to the liberal side of the ideological spectrum. There is little doubt that, in the absence of existing professional standards that bar journalists from making political contributions, the results would be overwhelmingly favorable to Democrats. And this bias has been clear to anybody not wearing ideological blinders for decades. Consider this from the Media Research Center:

Editors Group Noted the Growing Imbalance: In 1996, the American Society of Newspaper Editors surveyed 1,037 journalists at 61 newspapers. They learned that newsrooms were more ideologically unrepresentative than they had been in the late 1980s: “In 1996 only 15 percent of the newsroom labeled itself conservative/Republican or leaning in that direction, down from 22 percent in 1988,” when the ASNE last conducted a comprehensive survey. Those identifying themselves as independent jumped from 17 to 24 percent while the percent calling themselves “liberal/Democrat” or leaning left held steady, down one point to 61 percent.
The ASNE report, The Newspaper Journalists of the ‘90s, also revealed that bigger — presumably more influential — newspapers had the most liberal staffs: “On papers of at least 50,000 circulation, 65 percent of the staffs are liberal/Democrat or lean that way. The split at papers of less than 50,000 is less pronounced: still predominantly liberal, but 51-23 percent.”

The bias has become even more pronounced in the Trump era, as reported last December by The Economist, which employed some sophisticated academic research techniques to measure how journalists react to the language of Democrats and Republicans:

We find that there is indeed an affinity between the media and the left, because journalists tend to prefer the language used by Democratic lawmakers. Moreover, this disparity has grown since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency. As a result, the number of media sources covering politics in balanced language has dwindled.

It's true that Harris would almost certainly be a disaster were she subjected to the withering blizzard of critically couched, rapid-fire questions that typified Trump's four years in the Oval Office. Even given the velvet-glove treatment Harris would get from the vast majority of journalists, there is always the possibility that some loner of an independent scribe might somehow manage to be recognized and then ask a question Harris can't handle.

So, don't be surprised between now and Election Day when Harris does only one wide-open news conference on the campaign trail. Or none.