The Media Research Center had its marching orders from the Trump campaign after Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee: destroy her. This started by raging that people said nice things about her after President Biden withdrew from the race. The next step: pedantically obsess over her “border czar” designation — the apparent assigned talking point du jour for July 24. Alex Christy spent a post being angry that fact-checkers pointed out that the title never meant that she was ever in charge of border security:
The nitpickers, who style themselves as fact-checkers at PolitiFact and USA Today, have rushed to Vice President Kamala Harris’s defense by slapping “false” labels on those who seek to label her as the Biden Administration’s “border czar” in order to claim that her failure to stem illegal immigration proves she is unqualified to be president.
On Wednesday, PolitiFact’s Maria Ramirez Uribe gave the Republican National Committee a “mostly-false” rating.
For Uribe, calling Harris the border czar is wrong because “Biden didn’t put Harris in charge of overseeing border security.” Rather, he “said Harris would lead U.S. diplomatic efforts and work with officials in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras to stem migration to the U.S.”
Uribe also objected to the “czar” title because “Managing the border ‘has always been’ the Homeland Security secretary’s role, [Migration Policy Institute communications director Michelle] Mittelstadt said.”
Previously, USA Today’s Andre Byik claimed on Tuesday that it is “false” to say “Kamala Harris was ‘put in charge of the border.’”
Byik wrote, “The post exaggerates the vice president’s role in addressing migration at the southern border. Harris was never put in charge of the border or made ‘border czar,’ immigration experts said. President Joe Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s diplomatic efforts addressing the ‘root causes’ of migration in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.”
Case closed, right? Not when there’s a right-wing talking point to perpetuate, and that’s what Christy is being paid to do:
Both Uribe and Byik are trying too hard to be clever. Sure, Harris was never formally appointed border czar, but “czar” has also come to mean “someone in charge of something.” The media, including USA Today, called Mike Pence Donald Trump’s COVID czar despite Pence never formally being given the position and Trump rejecting the idea. Other media outlets even used the term for Harris at the time.
Second, Uribe and Byik want to claim that Harris wasn’t in charge of the border, but the administration’s diplomatic push to address the border surge’s “root causes,” but that is like saying it is false to say a sports general manager is to blame for his team’s bad season because he’s not the coach or the players, he just selects them.
By labeling Harris the “border czar,” conservatives and Republicans are just using the media’s Mike Pence standard, but thanks to PolitiFact and USA Today, such terms could lead to your Facebook post’s getting throttled.
At no point does Christy deny that, title aside, Harris was never in charge of border security. Seems that Christy is the one trying too hard to be clever.
It took both Nicholas Fondacaro and Bill D’Agostino to put together this fit of rage:
Since Vice President Kamala Harris was severely lacking in actual accomplishments from her time in the Biden administration, and was now the presumptive Democratic Party nominee for president, the liberal media were frantically trying to gaslight Americans on her abysmal record as President Biden’s border czar and sterilize it. In this effort, media outlets such as ABC, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Time, TIME magazine and Axios have taken to lying about Harris’s role in failing to get the crisis at the border under control.
The New York Times was one of the earliest. In an article published on July 17, during the Republican National Convention, titled “Why Republicans Keep Calling Kamala Harris the ‘Border Czar’” reporters Jazmine Ulloa and Nicholas Nehamas huffed, “Republicans at their national convention this week have trained some of their most intense criticism on Vice President Kamala Harris…But perhaps no phrase has been deployed more than this one: ‘border czar.’”
“But Ms. Harris was not, in fact, appointed border czar, nor was she tasked with addressing the broader problems plaguing the border itself,” they falsely suggested. They tried to split hairs by adding: “Rather she was deputized by President Biden with the diplomatic mission of solving the ‘root causes’ of migration from countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, tackling the issues that spur people to flee in the first place, like drug violence and lack of economic opportunity.”
Axios’s framing was arguably the most ridiculous. In a Wednesday article lamenting how “Harris border confusion haunts her new campaign,” reporter Stef W. Kight proclaimed: “The Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the ‘border czar’ title — which she never actually had.” She also suggested Harris’s duties didn’t pertain to the border directly and only the “root causes” in Central and South American countries.
But neither writer would concede that border security was never part of Harris’ “czar” designation.
Trim Graham rehashed this deliberately obtuse whining in his July 24 podcast:
In the last day or two, Kamala’s Messaging Police also battled the facts and claimed that she was never appointed to a position called “Border Czar.” Never mind that the “mainstream media” called her that and underlined that Biden appointed her to “stem the tide” of illegal immigration. She failed, so now they’re trying to pretend she had a narrow mission to travel to Guatemala and investigate “root causes” of the influx.
PolitiFact and USA Today‘s fact checkers tried to argue that “Biden didn’t put Harris in charge of overseeing border security,” that this was always the job of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Never mind the 2021 headlines like Biden puts Harris in charge of border crisis (Axios.com) and Biden tasks Harris with ‘stemming the migration’ on southern border (NBC News).
You also can’t say the result was “open borders.” They call themselves “independent fact-checkers” but their defensive behavior turns that into a lie. “Fact checkers” are spin spoilers.
Christy returned to play fact-check whataboutism in a July 25 post:
On Wednesday, PolitiFact beclowned itself as it claimed it is “mostly-false” for Republicans to say Vice President Kamala Harris was appointed “border czar.” However, that was not all. Also on Wednesday, PolitiFact tried to attack the party for condemning Democrats for not knowing what a woman is and other “LGBTQ+ talking points” from the Republican National Convention.
Jeffrey Lord dutifully pushed the narrative in his July 27 column:
According to President Biden himself he literally said he appointed Harris “to lead our efforts” on dealing with the border crisis. Say again, he said he was appointing her “to lead.” And, again, the literal dictionary definition of “czar” is “leader.” Which is to say: “to lead.”
The point here is simple.
The liberal media has gone out of its way to mislead Americans about Harris’s role in dealing with the border crisis. Why? Because to acknowledge that Biden did in fact appoint his Vice President “to lead our efforts” on the border – which is to say, to borrow from the literal dictionary definition of the word “czar”- to act as the “border czar”? To admit the obvious is to admit that Harris has failed abysmally at her Biden-assigned job “to lead our efforts” in resolving the border crisis.
Suffice to say the media kerfuffle over referring to Harris as the “border czar” is really a major indicator of the serious lengths the liberal media will go to camouflage the truth of a matter if that truth does not reflect well on the liberal media darling of the moment.
And at this moment, the current liberal media darling is Vice President and soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. She the once upon a time “Border Czar” – leader – per no less than President Joe Biden himself.
A week later, the MRC was still clinging to its deliberately obtuse narrative. Fondacaro huffed in a July 31 post:
After waiting a week, NewsBusters can report that ABC’s The View had finally done the meme and falsely claimed Vice President Kamala Harris (the presumptive Democratic Party nominee) was “never” the border czar. In fact, during Wednesday’s episode, moderator Whoopi Goldberg literally held up a note card and seemingly read the widely spread Democratic Party talking points about “root causes” of migration and the lie that President Biden never appointed her to that role.
The same day, Tom Olohan played gotcha with artificial intelligence over the title:
Meta AI and ChatGPT were willing to tell the truth about Vice President Kamala Harris’s disastrous role as border czar, a stark contrast to the legacy media and so-called fact-checkers aggressively policing any mentions of her role and responsibilities.
According to answers provided to MRC researchers on Wednesday, both chatbots admitted that referring to Harris as “border czar” is appropriate in some contexts. Notably, Meta AI and ChatGPT also agreed that doing so served an important educational purpose and provided clarity to average Americans. ChatGPT called the term a “useful shorthand,” the “essence of Harris’s responsibilities related to migration,” and a “descriptive term used for clarity and emphasis.”
[…]When asked whether the media should object to Harris being referred to as the border czar, Meta AI offered an immediate negative answer. Meta AI not only suggested that it might be pedantic to reject the term but also nailed the reason that the legacy media objects to the term: “Objecting to its use could be seen as overly pedantic or attempts to control language.”
ChatGPT did not offer a definitive answer to this question. Instead, the chatbot suggested it might be pedantic to try to shut down people referring to Harris as border czar. “Similar informal titles have been used in the past (e.g., “Drug Czar”) without significant controversy. These terms are commonly understood to represent a focus area rather than an official title,” it answered.
As if Olohan and his MRC co-workers aren’t being overly pedantic by pushing a politicized definition of the term on people solely to score points against a political enemy.