To be perfectly honest, I have not closely followed the incessant parade of stories about the reportedly hapless tenure of Vice President Kamala Harris, her staffing issues, and her unremarkable impact on the Biden administration.

Each time the headlines ebb and flow, I am continually reminded of Harris’ description of learning over the years to turn a blind eye to the naysayers and just “eat ‘no’ for breakfast.”

“You know, I have in my career been told many times, ‘It’s not your time. It’s not your turn,‘” Harris explained in a pre-2020 election video posted on social media. “And let me just tell you, I eat ‘no’ for breakfast, so I would recommend the same. It’s a hearty breakfast.”

The sad thing is, I believe questions about how Harris is performing and a gauging of her strengths and weaknesses to be an entirely newsworthy story—both in terms of this administration and with an eye to the future.

But I simply don’t trust the beltway media to provide any fair treatment or insightful analysis of those important questions. Why? After watching reporters gloss over Donald Trump’s horrifically weak and corrupt biography in 2016 so they could take repeated bad-faith potshots at Hillary Clinton, I may never again trust the D.C. press corps to properly cover any woman either seeking or elected to higher office—let alone a woman of color.

In my view, Hillary Clinton remains the most qualified candidate to have ever run for U.S. president given her front-row seat at the White House, perch in the U.S. Senate, and term as secretary of state. But a complete breakdown in coverage—at The New York Times, in particular—was arguably a contributing factor in dooming her campaign. The Times’ damage wasn’t simply the result of a wellspring of unflattering soft-news coverage, which most certainly existed. Rather, it was two preelection stories specifically that, on one hand, errantly reported the Justice Department had been asked to launch a criminal inquiry into Clinton, while on the other hand exonerating Trump by reporting the FBI had found no “direct link between Mr. Trump and the Russian government.” By the time the Times was finished issuing corrections about the supposed criminal inquiry request into Clinton it was no longer criminal in nature, nor was Clinton directly implicated.

So my conclusions about the capabilities of beltway media and the White House press corps I was once a part of aren’t a matter of prejudicial whimsy. The Times clearly got both hard-news stories wrong and later failed to show any insight or remorse about a pattern of serious internal failings and slanted coverage throughout the 2016 election. Indeed, in 2017, the Columbia Journalism Review published the findings of a detailed analysis of the Times’ 2016 coverage that concluded it was more harmful than fake news.

Fast forward to the reported woes of Harris. Maybe there’s some truth to it? But just as likely, maybe not.

Eric Boehlert, who founded the substack publication Press Run, only added to my inherent skepticism with a Thursday post in which he revisited some of the breathless coverage of white, male vice presidents past.

Boehlert’s sampling of headlines included:

“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/25/magazine/the-education-of-dan-quayle.html">The Education of Dan Quayle</a>”
“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/us/cheney-ever-more-powerful-as-crucial-link-to-congress.html">Cheney Ever More Powerful As Crucial Link to Congress</a>”
“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/us/politics/29biden.html">Speaking Freely, Biden Finds Influential Role</a>”
“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/us/politics/vice-president-mike-pence.html">Amid White House Tumult, Pence Offers Trump a Steady Hand</a>”

While it would be easy enough to cherry-pick glowing coverage of almost any given official from more than a century’s worth of archives, Boehlert’s observations about the Pence piece provided the most immediate and telling juxtaposition to Harris. Boehlert writes:

Can you imagine the Beltway coverage if Harris had served as a point-person for a crucial House vote and then lost it? 

I mean, c’mon—the White House and congressional Republicans had just botched their seven-year push to repeal Obamacare and would go on to botch it again, ultimately never getting the legislation through Congress. It was a total black eye for Trump’s White House, and yet here were the opening paragraphs of the March 28, 2017 Times’ story after the initial failed vote:

Mr. Pence, a Hill-wise former Indiana congressman who is typically a palliative presence in an administration of piranhas, had been keeping tabs on conservatives, counseling the president not to take anything for granted, and he urged Mr. Trump to take a hard line against his ideological allies who were pushing for a far more radical rewrite of the Affordable Care Act.

During the course of the last two trying weeks, as less-experienced advisers floundered — and others skipped town — Mr. Pence emerged as an effective, if not ultimately successful, wingman for a president short on competent help.

Seriously? Someone managed to convince Times’ reporters Haberman and Glenn Thrush that Pence’s skepticism was a crowning achievement as he calmly led Team Trump into the jaws of defeat.

Now, as Boehlert pointed out, just imagine the sensational series of scathing headlines that would have hounded Harris over the past couple weeks if she had been running point on Build Back Better.

That really crystalized things for me. So although I would like to have a decent handle on how Harris and her team are performing—an undoubtedly important topic—I can’t escape the sexist media vortex that still corrupts any coverage of a woman who dares to break glass ceilings in Washington, especially when she’s a woman of color.

All I can hope is that some future piece on “The Education of Kamala Harris” will be a lengthy meditation on how she managed to navigate a press corps seemingly incapable of covering people who aren’t white and male.