Andrew Stiles of the Washington Free Beacon notices legacy media outlets changing their tune about the 2024 election.

Now that Donald Trump is president and the 2024 election a distant memory, mainstream journalists can finally admit that Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate and her campaign was a complete disaster. A recently published excerpt from a forthcoming book about the election offers an assessment of Harris’s candidacy that is dramatically different from the media coverage at the time.

“Vice President Kamala Harris wasn’t performing well in softball interviews as her sugar high faded in September and early October,” journalists Amie Parnes and Jonathan Allen write in their book Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House. Harris had “bombed” her interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, the authors continue, in the midst of negotiations to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The appearance, which never happened, would have been “a relatively risky move for a campaign leadership that had kept its candidate hermetically sealed in the manufacturer’s box, like she would retain more value without exposure to air and sunlight.”

While accurate, the analysis is completely at odds with what many mainstream journalists were saying about Harris during the campaign. The suggestion that she “bombed” the Fox News interview, for example, does not reflect how the media covered Harris’s performance at the time. …

… Many of these takes were remarkably similar to campaign spokesman Brian Fallon’s assessment that Harris had shown “toughness in standing against a hostile interviewer.” Generally speaking, most media outlets highlighted the “testy” or “fiery” nature of the interview, while playing up the fact that Harris had “differentiated herself from President Joe Biden more clearly than she has in the past,” according to CNN. This was technically true, but hardly a groundbreaking development. …

… Most normal observers would agree that Harris “wasn’t performing well in softball interviews” in the fall of 2024, but that’s not what most journalists and pundits were saying at the time.