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Were Media Fair to Kamala Harris?

Narrative Said to Be Bullish Toward White Men

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Narrative Said to Be Bullish Toward White Men

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., tweeted this photo of himself and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., hugging after she announced her withdrawal from the presidential race. They were the only two African American candidates. (Credit: Twitter)

Over Thanksgiving, the Washington Post and the New York Times both published brutal stories about the state of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign,Jon Allsop reported Wednesday for Columbia Journalism Review.

“The Post said she was ‘teetering,’ burdened by ‘indecision within her campaign, her limits as a candidate, and dwindling funds.’ The Times obtained a scathing resignation letter in which Kelly Mehlenbacher, a senior aide, criticized campaign leadership for inconsiderate management, including laying off employees without notice.

“‘ ‘This is my third presidential campaign and I have never seen an organization treat its staff so poorly,’ Mehlenbacher wrote. (She has since joined Michael Bloomberg’s campaign.) On Friday, Politico’s Playbook newsletter shared both pieces, calling them ‘two nail-in-coffin stories for Kamala Harris.’

“Yesterday, Harris called it quits. ‘I’ve taken stock and looked at this from every angle, and over the last few days have come to one of the hardest decisions of my life,’ she told supporters.

” ‘My campaign for president simply doesn’t have the financial resources we need to continue.’ Yesterday, the inevitable postmortems blamed the internal dysfunction and rancor; Harris’s enduring slump in the polls, aided by other candidates, including Joe Biden, eating away at her early support; her vacillation on important policy issues, most notably healthcare; and her past criminal-justice record, which made her candidacy anathema to many progressives. Most centrally, they cited Harris’s failure to pick a clear message and stick with it.

” ‘Kamala Harris was never as easy to put on a bumper sticker as some of the others,’ Chelsea Janes, who wrote the Post’s Thanksgiving story on Harris, said on PBS. ‘She sort of lost clarity in exactly who she was, and why she was running.’

“Some commentators identified another culprit: the media. On Sunday, before we knew Harris would drop out, MSNBC’s Joy Reid said the Harris-crisis stories illustrated a broader truth about the standards to which different candidates are held: ‘The narrative around the Democratic primary seems to be very bullish toward white, male candidates, and lukewarm on women and minorities.’

“Yesterday, post-dropout, the Rev. Al Sharpton echoed Reid’s point. ‘I’ve never seen a candidate taken apart the way she was in the last several days,’ he said, also on MSNBC. ‘Yes, there were organizational problems. Yes, there were financial problems. But you have people on that debate stage who have no organization at all.’ . . .”

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“Thirteen years old is when a black kid in Mississippi learns he’s an adult. Isaiah figured it out at the beginning of seventh grade when he got into trouble at his favorite place in town,” began the report from Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

“Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga,” a graphic novel and public art exhibition at the Library Company of Philadelphia that debuted last month, reinterprets a genocidal campaign and its aftermath from the perspective of the indigenous peoples. (Credit: Lee Francis and Will Fenton)

Doreen Peter Noni , “East Africa’s Oprah” (Credit: ozy.com)

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