First 100 Days: The Media gushes over VP Kamala Harris, largely ignores border inaction

There seems to be a theme to the first 100 days of media coverage of Vice President Kamala Harris. The reports are light on policy, but heavy on fashion, footwear...and knitting.

Last month The Washington Post's Jura Koncius followed Harris to a crochet shop in Alexandria, VA, and concluded that the VP is making crochet cool again. Koncius wrote that Harris' admittal that she crochets has enhanced the hobby's "cool factor." Crocheters, she writes, now feel as though Harris has given them more "street cred" and the fiber arts community is "a bit giddy" about it.

Then, last Wednesday, the day of President Biden's first address to a joint session of Congress, the New York Times posted a report entitled, "100 Days of Vice-Presidential Style," with the subtitle, "Kamala Harris doesn’t want to talk about clothes. Neither does Jill Biden. You can understand why. But lots of people still want to know what they are wearing."

The editors retroactively analyzed Harris' inauguration outfit, interpreting that her fashion choices marked "a new dawn for the American fashion industry." 

"Ms. Harris wore clothes by three different independent Black designers, including a purple dress and coat that merged blue and red," the Times writes. "It seemed to herald a new age of conscious dress, and a new dawn for the American fashion industry, reeling after four years of an administration that had trampled all political norms, including the tradition of using their clothes as an expression of patriotic duty. Not to mention the effects of the coronavirus pandemic, with its closures and bankruptcies."

WAPO MOCKED FOR FAWNING FEATURE ON KAMALA HARRIS' CROCHETING: 'HOW'S THE BORDER GOING?'

The Los Angeles Times was mocked after announcing in January that it would launch the section "Covering Kamala Harris" as "a beat dedicated to her historic rise to the White House." Critics said the Times was acting less like a news outlet and more like a "PR firm" for the Biden administration.

Harris has graced a few magazine covers, as well. Vogue, for instance, featured her on the cover of their February 2021 issue.

"We’ve gone from invisible as it pertained to Melania Trump to inescapable with Kamala Harris," Fox News contributor and The Hill's Joe Concha told Fox News. "What was hostile towards the Nikki Haleys and Kayleigh McEnanys is now hospitable with the First Lady." 

Last week some media also gushed over Harris saying it was "normal" for two women to be sitting behind the president at his congressional address. CNN took the opportunity to write glowingly of Harris' path to the vice presidency, and suggested that she's ahead of the curve on seeing through the president's agenda.

"Harris, who sat in the chamber last year as a California senator, has forged a path toward becoming one of the President's most important advisers, telling CNN's Dana Bash in an exclusive interview last week that she is the last one in the room when Biden is making key decisions, including withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan," CNN writes.

NBC's "TODAY" show chose an image of Harris elbow bumping House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the joint session as their "photo of the week."

And yet, when it comes to the border, critics note that her silence on the crisis has spoken volumes. Concha and others wonder where all the negative media coverage is as it pertains to the VP's lack of transparency after refusing to hold a press conference since being appointed as President Biden's border czar.

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"Given the crisis that is now a catastrophe at the border, one would think coverage of the Vice President — who was put in charge of it and has failed craptastically thus far by avoiding the most basic of steps by actually not seeing it firsthand or talking to officials on the ground — wouldn’t be so glowing," Concha said. "But it’s really no surprise given how much of a PR and activist role much of our media has embraced in broad daylight." 

Making Concha's same observation, critics of the Washington Post's glowing feature on Harris's knitting hobby asked the editors, "How's the border going?"

The media has seemingly been just as sycophantic to President Biden in these first 100 days.