Double standard?

The media is demanding candid responses from Harris while letting Trump get away with no answers at all

Friends,

First, the media criticized Harris for not submitting to more interviews. Now that she’s submitted to interview after interview over the last several weeks, the media is criticizing her for not answering questions clearly enough.

“She keeps answering the question she wants, not the one that was asked,” writes Michael Bender for The New York Times — as if Bender has found in Harris a notably new trait among politicians, as if candidates for office usually answer questions they are asked rather than questions they want to answer.

She’s “lawyerly, argumentative and fundamentally defensive,” Bender continues. Hello? What about Donald Trump?

“She often deflects or sidesteps.” Ditto.

She “often responds to unpleasant questions without answering them, questions the very premise of questions she finds unfair and can take it upon herself to reword a query she considers unhelpful.”

Oh, please. That’s what a smart candidate does.

She “put her own stamp on the art of the dodge.”

This is what passes for reporting in our nation’s preeminent newspaper. But it’s meaningless because there’s no standard against which Harris is being held, except for Donald Trump, who has made his entire life into a dodge.

The media is applying a vicious double standard here — letting Trump get away scot-free with his salads of meaningless blather while holding Harris to an unrealistic standard of cogency and candor.

She’s being criticized for declining to answer a question on “60 Minutes” about whether she considered Benjamin Netanyahu to be a close ally.

Why should she answer this? If she said she does consider Netanyahu a close ally, she’d antagonize all supporters of the Palestinian people. If she said she doesn’t consider him a close ally, she’d antagonize supporters of Israel and Netanyahu. What news value would there be in her taking one side or the other?

Asked in that same interview if the United States has “no sway over Prime Minister Netanyahu,” Harris wisely described diplomatic relations with him as “an ongoing pursuit.” When the “60 Minutes” interviewer noted that Netanyahu “was not listening,” Harris responded by saying the administration was “not going to stop pursuing” an end to the war.

This has also attracted media criticism. But what should she have said? That the United States has no influence over Netanyahu and is giving up trying to influence him?

She’s being criticized for failing to detail how she would pay for her $3 trillion economic plan. But she’s already produced an 82-page book with lots of budget details. Trump’s plan costs more than twice as much, and he’s claiming to pay for it with tariffs!

She’s being criticized for not saying whether she’d select Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman, for her Cabinet. But how many presidential candidates name people from the opposing party whom they’d put in their Cabinet?

Donald Trump doesn’t even give interviews. He refused the invitation from “60 Minutes.” He declined an invitation for a second debate with Harris. Recently, he’s even refusing to participate in interviews or debates that include fact-checking.

When Trump has given interviews over the past five weeks, his interviewers haven’t challenged him at all. That’s because they’re all with conservative media outlets or openly support his candidacy.

Before that, you’ll recall, Trump bulldozed his way through tough interviews — refusing to answer questions he didn’t want to, or just lying.

The core issue here is the information asymmetry between the two candidates. Everyone knows Trump; almost everyone made their minds up about him long ago.

But many voters still don’t know Harris. In a New York Times/Siena College poll last month, 1 out of every 4 voters said they needed to learn more about Harris — compared with just 1 of every 10 who said the same about Trump. I don’t know how much of this reflects unconscious racism or misogyny, but it’s real.

So the double standard the media is using to judge Harris’s responses relative to Trump’s isn’t really about her. It’s about the fact that voters don’t know her nearly as well as they know him.

When The New York Times concludes that Harris’s “verbal acrobatics may be contributing to the impression that some voters have that they do not know her or her policy views very well” and that this “has become a key weakness,” it sounds as if she’s being faulted for evasiveness.

Wrong. She’s doing the best she can to show Americans who she is, but she has only three months to do it.

At bottom, the question is whether American voters will go along with the devil they know — Trump — or with a younger woman of color who has everything Trump lacks: intelligence, integrity, and concern for all of America.