…But I wonder if it was ever really where they said it was.  The host is opening the show, as I write, about the fact that as yesterday wore on people started to realize that Harris may not have walked away with the debate victory everybody said it was.  The host focuses on the fact that “the fix was in” with the moderators.  Later in the day yesterday outlets like the NYTimes and BBC released stories with headlines like “Pundits Said Harris Won the Debate. Undecided Voters Weren’t So Sure” and “Trump’s message of American decline resonates with pivotal voters.”  Hmmmm.

My take yesterday was that her attitude did as much, probably more, damage to her campaign than Trump’s temper did to his.  I am not alone in that analysis.

Then there was her continuing and total lack of substance….

So, the tide of opinion seems to be turning.  Whether people are revolting at the media bias overreach, her mocking of Trump, or the fact that she never answered a question substantially, people seem to be realizing that Harris is all window dressing on an empty store – or worse, a store that does not want you to know what you are buying.  And I am seeing a pattern here.

After the Trump/Biden debate I commented that the Biden pile-on was, to my mind, suspicious.  The host disagreed.  I want to expand on my comment then a bit.  The media bias is now naked, but we all knew about it then.  They would have been inclined to try and spin that debate in Biden’s favor.  But almost to a pundit, they immediately said he had to go, defying their natural instincts – without hesitation, without stuttering, without thinking about it.  Much as I disagree with the liberal pundits, they generally think about what they are doing – I just had my doubts that they would spin that hard and that fast unless they had come into it prepared to do so.  It looked to me like the fix was in.

Well, now we know, without a doubt – the evidence from Tuesday night is overwhelming, that the legacy media, especially ABC, is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the Democrat party.  And here again, we saw an almost universal and loud declaration that “Harris won.”  It seemed as orchestrated as what we saw in the wake of Biden’s very public failure in his debate with Trump.  However, after many weeks of watching an inarticulate void be replaced by an articulate void, we are not so willing to buy in to that initial meme setting.  Besides, everybody knew that Biden had lost his capacity to function, and we were all inclined to see him gone.  That’s simply not true in this instance.

But here is the point – the effort to shape public opinion by the media went far beyond the rigging of the debate proper, or the spin room – it included the hot takes and immediate reactions.  It no longer is limited to the mainstream and now is a big part of social media.  There is much buzz about her social media strategy and there have been assertions that she is paying for it.  We used to talk about “controlling the narrative” – and here we are seeing it again, just through a different communication stream.  Legacy media has reduced itself to reporting what is going on in social media, so now the effort to control the narrative has switched to social media.

But the good news is social media is too diverse to actually accomplish that goal.  The legacy media may amplify the left-leaning social media, and the left-leaning social media may be better organized than right-leaning social media, giving the left great first-strike capability.  But first strikes are not the war.

Undecided voters are not reactionary, they are thoughtful and curious.  Media first strikes are unlikely to influence them much.