On Kamala Harris' Role, Media Cross Border Into Outright Lies

Facts are facts, even if they make new presidential candidate Kamala Harris look bad. This fact is undeniable, no matter how much dishonest media try to obfuscate it: President Joe Biden appointed the vice president to stem the tide of migrants to the U.S. southern border. Period. No wiggle room.

And the almost inarguable judgment is that she failed at the job. Miserably. The tide didn't recede; it rose and crashed in huge waves upon our (figurative) shores.

It was way back on March 24, 2021. Biden, in a White House meeting that included Harris, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, announced he was tapping Harris to lead the administration's response to the growing number of migrants arriving at the U.S. border. Her job, he said, was "stemming the migration to our southern border." He also said she "agreed to lead our diplomatic effort and work with nations (to our South) to accept re- -- the returnees, and enhance migration enforcement at their borders -- at their borders."

Biden told reporters before the meeting that he wanted Harris to be the point person on the border, to speak decisively for the administration. And in a call to reporters after the announcement, a senior official told reporters unequivocally that Harris' focus would be on the historic surge of illegal border crossings.

Within hours stories emerged in major news organizations with clarity that Biden was tasking her with leading efforts to stem migration at the border, with dozens of elite news organizations referring to her as the "border czar." This is irrefutable history. It's all documented.

Nonetheless, one hour after Biden endorsed Harris on July 21, news organizations and Democrats were stridently saying it was never the case that Harris was in charge of the border, that they never said she was the border czar and that the claim was all a right-wing conspiracy.

Axios, a popular Washington insider online news organization, not only scrubbed part of its story from 2021 reporting Harris was "appointed by Biden as border czar," but also said in an editor's note that it had "incorrectly" labeled Harris a border czar. At least it admitted it originally called her that.

It was one of the most remarkably dishonest moments in American journalism, a once revered industry that in recent years has lost the trust of the people to report the news in a full, fair and accurate way. And it wasn't just Axios. The gaslighting of readers across multiple news organizations has been equally repulsive -- and it may just be the final straw in that relationship between readers and news organizations.

The New York Times admonished readers, saying, "Ms. Harris was not, in fact, appointed border czar, nor was she tasked with addressing the broader problems plaguing the border itself."

That is not what Biden said. That is not what the press wrote and said.

Simply put, they were either lying then or they are lying now.

For years the national press has had what they referred to as "disinformation beats" and used them to rush to say that social media platforms should not feature certain news stories or news outlets, almost all of them center-right or conservative, on their sites.

And now they are engaged in disinformation that discredits their own reporting. They need to call themselves out for disinformation. Either they're lying now or they were lying then.

They called Harris the border czar at the time, and now they're saying she wasn't the border czar. That means they weren't very good reporters at the time. And so, they need to address their reporters who called Harris the wrong thing.

It's a statement that their own product was wrong or it's wrong now. It's one or the other.

What they don't understand is that most people are smarter than that, and that their takeaway is, "Oh, you just want to help her." Because rest assured, if we had no immigration problem, Harris would be running on the fact that she's the border czar, and everybody knows it.

The same goes for the "nonpartisan" GovTrack, an organization that touts itself as a government transparency website that tracks congressional voting records that in the dark of night on Wednesday decided to scrub its 2019 rating of Harris as the most liberal U.S. senator in the upper chamber.

GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer told Fox News the page was removed because it was not "a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators."

Run that by us again? He says the same rating that is GovTrack's stock in trade, one that has been on site for years, suddenly is not accurate? If her rating is not accurate, doesn't that throw into question GovTrack's entire rating system? It can't be inaccurate for just her but not for 99 other senators.

The truth is that it absolutely was correct all along, but now it's so embarrassing to their candidate that GovTrack is falling on its own sword. Yet the reality is that if voters were not rejecting the far-left spiral that Biden has embraced since becoming president, Harris would indeed be running on her rating as the most liberal senator in the country.

In short, two storied institutions that are supposed to operate at the highest level of reliability not only scrubbed any evidence of their original reporting and rankings but somehow expected the general public to be OK with it -- all because the candidate the institutions prefer would be damaged by past reporting or rankings.

All this reporting was good until they now pretend it wasn't. And rather than stand behind their reporting, they are trying to pretend that it didn't happen. Which makes you wonder, were they terrible at reporting then, or is it just now?

In the words of Al Gore, the fact that Harris is the border czar is an inconvenient truth. No matter how much they try to get rid of the inconvenience, the truth, inviolable, remains.

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Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. She reaches the Everyman and Everywoman through shoe-leather journalism, traveling from Main Street to the beltway and all places in between. To find out more about Salena and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

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