Want to hear something funny? Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffery Goldberg and National Public Radio senior political editor Domenico Montanaro believe Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris is unfairly held to a higher standard than her opponent, Republican nominee Donald Trump.
Yet even in advancing this argument, they proved the opposite.
“I want to talk about, I’ll call it plainly, a double standard that we have in this campaign,” said Goldberg. “We’re sitting here, parsing, as we should, what the Democratic nominee for president says in an interview, how she answers questions about a whole range of subjects.”
He then played a video wherein Trump riffed about the inefficiency of green energy, including wind, and the correlation between clean energy mandates and the cost of groceries, including bacon. The point was completely lost on Goldberg.
“I’ll make this observation,” he said. “I’ll own it. If Kamala Harris went from bacon to wind in her interview with [CNN’s] Dana Bash, she would, this morning, not be — the next morning, she would not be the nominee of the Democratic Party.”
Goldberg seemed oddly baffled by the idea that any candidate would discuss how inefficient, artificially expensive energy alternatives drive up the cost of essential goods and services.
“That would have been a very, very strange — people would have been like, what is going on?” he said. “Do we just have an absurdly low standard now for the things that Donald Trump says and does?”
Responded Montanaro, “[T]here is definitely a double standard, and I think part of it is how each side’s voters interpret their candidate.”
“[F]rom a reporter’s standpoint,” he added, “we do have to be careful about how we — what level we hold both of them to.”
Of all things to cite as a contrast between Harris and Trump, they chose public speaking. Have they not heard Harris speak?
To hear journalists compare Trump’s rambling, nonsensical speaking style with Harris’s, as if there were any clear daylight between the two, is flat-out funny. Trump is infamously inarticulate and incomprehensible, especially if you don’t follow him from start to finish. He fills each sentence with so many tangents and digressions as to make himself almost unquotable.
But if there’s anyone who comes close to being as unintelligible and all-over-the-place as Trump, it’s Harris.
Try this Harris wisdom on for size: “[W]e will work together and continue to work together to address these issues, to tackle these challenges, and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules and agreements that we will convene to work together on to galvanize global action.”
Or this: “It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day.”
Also, this: “Culture is a reflection of our moment and our time, right? And present culture is the way we express how we’re feeling about the moment, and we should always find times to express how we feel about the moment that is a reflection of joy because, you know — it comes in the morning.”
Yet here we are, with two ostensibly well-educated writers and editors suggesting that, when it comes to public speaking, voters hold Harris to a higher standard than Trump.
“When I fact-checked Donald Trump’s hour press conference,” NPR’s Montanaro said to Goldberg, “he told 162 lies and distortions within that time period, 2.5 a minute, compared to Kamala Harris’s DNC acceptance speech, where she had 12 statements that I found were contextually misleading or needed more.”
About that 162 lies “fact-check.” In a word, it’s absurd. Montanaro and his colleagues arrived at that number only by juicing the stats. They devalued what would have been a straightforward news report by applying standards that no serious reporter would ever use on any other candidate.
“[President Joe Biden is] a very angry man right now,” Trump said during his Aug. 8 presser. “I can tell you that. He’s not happy with Obama, and he’s not happy with Nancy Pelosi. Crazy Nancy, she is crazy, too.”
NPR’s “fact-check” found multiple lies in this statement of opinion. “Trump can’t speak to Biden’s state of mind,” it stated. “[A]ll evidence is that Nancy Pelosi is perfectly sane — see her recent multiple rounds of interviews about her book, including with NPR.”
Trump also said of Harris, who has mostly avoided the press since winning her party’s nomination: “She can’t do an interview. She’s barely competent, and she can’t do an interview.”
NPR responded with this unintentionally hilarious paragraph: “Harris hasn’t done interviews since getting into the campaign, but she has done them in the past, so saying ‘she can’t do’ one or that she is ‘barely competent’ are just insults. Trump tends to revert to questioning the intelligence of Black women who challenge him.”
Said Trump, “And we’re very close to a world war. In my opinion, we’re very close to a world war.”
Responded NPR: “No serious person thinks that the U.S., Russia and China are about to start a world war.” That’s interesting because in January, NPR published several panicky stories announcing that the so-called doomsday clock had moved closer to midnight, signaling “existential threats of nuclear war.”
“[Harris is] the border czar,” Trump said. “By the way, she was the border czar, 100 percent. And all of a sudden, for the last few weeks, she’s not the border czar anymore, like nobody ever said it.”
NPR’s fact-check responded, “Harris was never appointed ‘border czar.’ That’s a phrase that was used incorrectly by some media outlets.”
This is a lie. When President Biden tapped Harris for the role, the vice president assumed all the duties (and then some) of former ambassador to Mexico Roberta S. Jacobson, who had been known then as the “border czar.” It was only after Harris’s mishandling of the matter proved politically disadvantageous that certain journalists decided to re-write history and claim she was never the border czar, but merely the “root causes” czar.
Trump also said at his presser, “Rasmussen came out today. We’re substantially leading.”
NPR found this to be a lie. “Trump is not substantially leading, and Rasmussen is viewed as one of the least credible pollsters in the country.”
But at the time of Trump’s remarks, Rasmussen had him five points ahead of Harris. Doesn’t that make his statement true? As for the rest of the “fact-check,” it isn’t even a fact-check, it’s just Democratic Party rapid response.
Trump exaggerates; he loves hyperbole. And yes, he lies. He lies a lot. There is no reason to bloat a Trump fact-check with filler. In theory, he provides all the material you would ever need.
But the way NPR fudged the numbers here evinces not just plain bias but also a political agenda. Anyone sufficiently motivated and willing to employ such incredible standards could just as easily find 162 “lies” in anyone’s speech, including Harris’s. For example, Harris said at her party’s convention that she believes “everyone has a right to safety, to dignity and to justice.” The inmates her office tried to exploit for cheap labor when she was California’s attorney general might have something to say about that.
Further, if NPR were to apply the full Trump standard to Harris, we would probably see fact-checks asserting that it’s actually impossible to be “unburdened by what has been.”
We don’t see such fact-checks, because NPR operates within a system of double standards. It believes in a second set of standards that contrive impossibly stringent “fact-checks” for Trump while publishing this paragraph in its meager fact-check of Harris’s convention speech: “It’s the role of the press to try and hold politicians to account for the accuracy of their statements in a good-faith way. The dozen Harris statements lacking in context are far less in comparison to 162 misstatements, exaggerations and outright lies that NPR found from Trump’s hour-long news conference Aug. 8.”
Goldberg and Montanaro are correct. There is a double standard in how these candidates are treated. It’s just not the double standard they think it is.
Becket Adams is a writer in Washington and program director for the National Journalism Center.