BLUF:
On specific, high-profile issues, there is nothing even remotely moderate about Harris. From supporting the hideously expensive Green New Deal and “Medicare for All” to supporting free health coverage for illegal immigrants, Harris is as far to the left as elected officialdom ever gets.

When media call Kamala Harris ‘centrist,’ it’s no wonder people hate the press.

The ludicrous establishment-media narrative portraying vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris as a “pragmatic moderate” or a “centrist” is a perfect example of the media’s abandonment of standards and integrity.

Even if political labels are somewhat subjective, there exist objective ways for “straight news” outlets to determine which labels to use, if they use such labels at all. Under none of those objective standards could Harris be ranked among anything other than the liberal edge of American elective politics.

This is important as much for what it says about the establishment media as for what it says about Harris. One major reason President Trump taps into the anger of so many “ordinary Americans,” including with his attacks on the media as the “enemy of the people,” is that the media have completely and rightly lost the public’s trust through their abandonment of objectivity in favor of leftist cheerleading. People resent it when they know they are being manipulated.

Much of the manipulation comes in the form of political labeling in supposedly “straight news” stories. The supposed “moderation” of Harris is a perfect case in point.

Dozens of organizations use predictable criteria to “rank” elected officials on conservative-to-liberal scales. It is possible for anomalies to skew an official’s ideology over a short time period in ranking systems. But over time, some ranking systems establish themselves as reliable indices of the predilections of those officials. When all these systems — right, left, and scrupulously neutral — agree, reporters who apply labels in contradiction of these rankings are putting their integrity in hock.

The two best-established ranking systems for broad-based ideology — as opposed to single-subject rankings such as those for pro-abortion rights or anti-abortion groups, anti-government-spending groups, or whatever — are from the American Conservative Union on the right and Americans for Democratic Action on the left. The ACU gives Harris a puny lifetime rating of 3 (with 0 being far Left and 100 being far Right). The ADA reports that except when she has missed votes altogether, Harris has a perfect liberal rating.

The website Progressive Punch agreed, rating Harris the fourth-most liberal of all 100 senators. The hard-right Heritage Action for America gives Harris a zero.

And on single-issue-area ratings, Harris likewise is as far left as imaginable, getting zero or near-zero ratings from anti-abortion groups, anti-tax groups, the conservative Family Research Council, the National Rifle Association, and others, while earning perfect 100 ratings from the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, the Human Rights Campaign, Planned Parenthood, government bureaucrats’ union American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, and the Council for American-Islamic Relations.

Now move to ratings without preset ideological preferences. The nonideological watchdog GovTrack.us gave Harris a score of 0.0 — the most liberal possible on a scale of 0 to 1.0 — a score even farther to the left than that of socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. And on the neutral grounds used by Congressional Quarterly to determine levels of partisanship, Harris was among the least likely people in the Senate to cross party lines, voting with fellow Democrats more than 99% of the time.

On specific, high-profile issues, there is nothing even remotely moderate about Harris. From supporting the hideously expensive Green New Deal and “Medicare for All” to supporting free health coverage for illegal immigrants, Harris is as far to the left as elected officialdom ever gets.

Beyond the policy reasons to be worried about Harris’s radical progressivism, what’s troubling is the establishment media’s rush to label a radical as a centrist, ignoring all the once-usual standards of objective reporting. The reason Trump gets traction accusing the media of “fake news” is that so much of their “news” really is fake.