http://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2021/01/22/it-was-awful-and-now-its-gone-reason-busts-wapo-for-memory-holing-an-honest-and-highly-inconvenient-moment-from-kamala-harris/
Back in 2019, the Washington Post published a story about Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
Reason’s Eric Boehm writes:
When The Washington Post published a 2019 campaign trail feature about then-presidential hopeful Kamala Harris’ close relationship with her sister, it opened with a memorable anecdote in which Harris bizarrely compared the rigors of the campaign trail to…life behind bars.
And then proceeded to laugh—at the idea of an inmate begging for a sip of water.
Boehm’s article has the full exchange.
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http://reason.com/2021/01/22/the-washington-post-memory-holed-kamala-harris-bad-joke-about-inmates-begging-for-food-and-water/
... Here's how the first seven paragraphs of that article, published by the Post on July 23, 2019, and bylined by features reporter Ben Terris, originally appeared:
It was the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and Kamala Harris was explaining to her sister, Maya, that campaigns are like prisons.
She'd been recounting how in the days before the Democratic debate in Miami life had actually slowed down to a manageable pace. Kamala, Maya and the rest of the team had spent three days prepping for that contest in a beach-facing hotel suite, where they closed the curtains to blot out the fun. But for all the hours of studying policy and practicing the zingers that would supercharge her candidacy, the trip allowed for a break in an otherwise all-encompassing schedule.
"I actually got sleep," Kamala said, sitting in a Hilton conference room, beside her sister, and smiling as she recalled walks on the beach with her husband and that one morning SoulCycle class she was able to take.
"That kind of stuff," Kamala said between sips of iced tea, "which was about bringing a little normal to the days, that was a treat for me."
"I mean, in some ways it was a treat," Maya said. "But not really."
"It's a treat that a prisoner gets when they ask for, 'A morsel of food please,' " Kamala said shoving her hands forward as if clutching a metal plate, her voice now trembling like an old British man locked in a Dickensian jail cell. "'And water! I just want wahtahhh….'Your standards really go out the f—ing window."
Kamala burst into laughter.
It should go without saying that choosing to run for the most powerful political office in the world is absolutely nothing like being behind bars—and getting to squeeze in a morning SoulCycle session before sitting down for an interview with a national newspaper is not remotely the same as dying of thirst. None of this is funny.
The scene was a brilliant bit of reporting and writing because it did what few political features can accomplish: showing, rather than telling, something about the candidate at the center. Harris made her name as a prosecutor, and her track record includes defending dirty cops and laughing off criticism of her history of throwing poor parents in jail when their kids missed school. The Post profile provided a mask-slipping moment that seemed to perfectly capture a warped sense of justice and lack of basic human dignity—all in just a few hundred words.
We've republished that passage here because you won't find it on the Post's website any longer.
The rest of the profile is still there, but with a new opening anecdote (presumably authored by political reporter Chelsea Janes, whose byline has been added to the piece and who has authored several fawning pieces about Harris this week) that compares now-Vice President Harris' relationship with her sister to that of former President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. After the opening section, the rest of the piece appears nearly identical to the version originally published in July 2019.
But what happened to the old version? The headline for that 18-month-old article still appears on Terris' page on the Post website with the original date it was published, but clicking the link redirects users to the new version published this month—the version that omits Harris' awful commentary about campaigns and prisons. ...
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Which is helpful, because if you search the Washington Post for it, you’ll come up empty:
Eric Boehm ~ The Washington Post's 2019 profile of Kamala Harris and her sister Maya contained an incredibly cringe-worthy scene in which Harris seemed to mock inmates and compared the difficulties of campaigning to life in prison.
It was awful.
And now it's gone.
Eric Boehm ~ The scene was a brilliant bit of reporting and writing. It was a mask-slipping moment that seemed to perfectly capture Harris' warped sense of justice and lack of basic human dignity — all in just a few hundred words.
And now it's gone.
No wonder honest journalism is so hard to come by these days. When someone accidentally does it, it gets flushed down the memory hole.
Eric Boehm ~ I asked the Post why the Harris feature was updated to remove quotes that showed the VP in an unflattering light.
The answer? "We repurposed and updated some of our strong biographical pieces about both political figures ... The original story remains available in print."
Eric Boehm ~ The Post, of course, can do whatever it pleases with its own content. It can update or rearrange or delete any detail in any story at any time.
But would it have "updated" a months-old feature to remove an inartful comment from Mike Pence? I doubt it. And that's the problem.
Eric Boehm ~ Legacy media has a trust problem right now -- lots of Americans seem to believe that "the media" is playing for one political team. Editorial decisions like this one, even if unintentional, feed into that perception.
Well, for what it’s worth, there was nothing unintentional about this.
Alex Griswold ~ Wait so WaPo purged a *two-year-old story* of an unflattering anecdote, and their response is "the original story remains available in print"?
Alex Griswold ~ "Now where'd I put that Maya Harris profile?"
So this is journalism, huh?
No, this is The WaPo, so this is nothing but pure, leftist propaganda.
Allahpundit ~ When exactly did WaPo rewrite its Harris story to memory-hole the joke she told about prisoners?
Allahpundit ~ I can’t imagine a justification for a newspaper deleting parts of old stories. Adding to them surreptitiously is also dubious, but not as bad.
Pathetic, WaPo. But then, that’s just how you guys roll, isn’t it?
David Harsanyi ~ Democracy dies in memory-holing inconvenient reporting about now-favored politicians.
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. ~ D.H. Lawrence
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