Quick Take: "I'm Going to Stop You"
It's not just a double standard—it's an alternate reality
If political candidates are to be judged by the character of their supporters, Kamala Harris is a sorry piece of work indeed.
In a previous article, I mentioned how unimpressively Harris performed during her truncated interview with FNC’s Brett Baier, and how rapturously that performance was received by the Bratgirl Admiration Society. But those hosannahs were accompanied by complaints that Mr. Baier had been such a meanie! He was so impolite! He kept interrupting! He wouldn’t help Harris dump on Trump! All this, of course, is comrade-speak for: Brett Baier was doing his job.
But when the interviewer is someone like Martha Raddatz and the interviewee is someone like J.D. Vance, we are transported to a universe far, far away, where a meanie is just doing her job.
All interviews between representatives of the “corporate media” and any Republican or conservative you care to name are combative by definition. The interviewer is not so much trying to elicit answers as to score points. The interviewee must reckon with the fact that anything he says is likely to be “fact checked,” i.e. challenged. So it was when Raddatz interviewed Vance on October 13 for ABC’s Sunday morning show, “This Week.”
The GOP vice-presidential candidate was talking about the takeover of apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado by Venezuelan migrant gangs when Raddatz cut him off. “I’m going to stop you,” she said, and proceeded to “fact check” him. Only “a few” apartment complexes had been taken over by criminal migrant gangs, Raddatz declared, as if criminal migrant gangs get a free pass up to a certain number of outrages.
Needless to say, Vance had a field day with that very revealing “fact check”—which exposed the disconnect between entitled twits like Martha Raddatz and American realities. Ah, but don’t you know, Raddatz was just doing her job: speaking truth to power as the saying goes. When a journalist comes up against someone like J.D. Vance, she’s supposed to be hostile, rude, and combative.
In his interview with Kamala Harris, Brett Baier was not particularly hostile, rude, or combative. He asked pointed questions—questions that surely Harris and her team anticipated—and when the candidate dodged those questions, he tried as best he could to elicit answers. But clearly, Harris was not there to answer questions but to rattle off her well-worn talking points and denounce Donald Trump.
Actually, it was Harris who was hostile, rude, and combative—feigning anger over Baier’s repeated attempts to cut off her long-winded filibustering and get answers. This, no doubt, was intended show toughness, though it came off as whiney petulance.
But how can it be that Brett Baier is a monster of journalistic evil while Martha Raddatz is a heroine of the journalistic profession? If one compares his behavior to hers, the contrast is stark. He was patient and polite yet persistent; she was impatient, impolite, argumentative, and in a hurry to throw down her bogus fact-check card. What we have here is not merely a double standard, but a bulletin from some alternate reality where the second-rate charlatans who mostly populate America’s newsrooms are fearless truth tellers. After all, only a few American apartment complexes have been taken over by criminal migrant gangs, Senator Vance…
In a debate or an interview, answering a question comes in two parts:
1) Answering the question, and,
2) Explaining and justifying your answer.
Harris regularly did part two while skipping over part one. For example, when asked about the border invasion problem and what she would do about it, she never said a thing about what she would do. She just went into a ramble about how our immigration system is broken and how she and Biden tried to fix it from the very first day (!!!) and it's all Trump's fault. Not a word about stemming the tide of illegal aliens.
And any time Bair tried to steer her back to the question, she complained he was interrupting her answer.
If he'd asked her whether she prefers hot dogs to hamburgers, she'd have spent the entire interview not answering that question.