In her Boston Globe column covering the Washington Free Beacon’s greatest hits — I wrote about it in “No equal on the left” earlier this week — Jill Abramson focused on the Beacon’s reporting on the higher education beat. She omitted stories with significant political impact.
One such story was the Free Beacon’s challenge to Kamala Harris’s fantasia about her summer employment at McDonald’s. Three Free Beacon reporters exposed Harris’s fantasia a year ago in “‘I Did Fries’: Kamala Harris Claims She Worked at McDonald’s, but She Never Mentioned It Until She Ran for President. Did She Really Toil Beneath the Golden Arches?”
The Free Beacon story led to candidate Trump’s serving up meals at a McDonald’s drive-through with an apron over Trump’s formal attire, minus only the navy blue suitcoat. Aside from “fight, fight, fight,” it was one of the most memorable moments of the 2024 campaign.
In this morning’s newsletter, the Free Beacon highlights Collin Anderson’s story “Kamala Harris Worked at McDonald’s For…Two Weeks, New Book Asserts Without Evidence.” The new book, linked below, is by three mainstream media reporters. The mainstream media coverage of the Harris/McDonald’s story is illustrative of why we detest the MSM. They are relentlessly pathetic. Here is the Free Beacon newsletter’s summary:
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Remember when Donald Trump, propelled by a Free Beacon investigation, declared that Kamala Harris never worked at McDonald’s? A new book examines the claim and asserts, without evidence, that Harris did toil under the Golden Arches for…two weeks.
That’s seemingly less time than the “weeks” Harris’s campaign spent “agonizing” over whether and how to respond to the “attacks,” according to 2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America by journalists Josh Dawsey, Tyler Pager, and Isaac Arnsdorf, who omit any mention of the Free Beacon while rehashing the ordeal. Harris’s allegedly short stint on the job meant “most advisers didn’t want to lean into her time at McDonald’s,” the book states, but Harris did so anyway. When questions emerged, the campaign considered deploying Harris’s sister, who is said to have worked alongside Harris, “for a feature story with a lifestyle magazine, but others viewed the story as too risky.”
When the New York Times covered the brouhaha in October, they compared the Free Beacon report, which found no evidence of Harris’s employment, to Trump’s questioning of Barack Obama’s place of birth. CNN’s Brian Stelter, meanwhile, characterized the fracas this way: “Harris shared this and then a pro-Trump website started to talk about, ‘Hey, is there evidence, is there proof she worked at McDonald’s, there’s no records, there’s no receipts.’ I find that bewildering.” So did Team Harris, it seems.
