Apparently the lessons of the past election are not sinking in for many as quickly as some thought.

Since the election, it has been confirmed that the Harris campaign paid Oprah Winfrey’s production company Harpo a million dollars for the elaborate event including Winfrey’s fawning interview of Harris on stage, and that it paid Al Sharpton’s National Action Network a half-million dollars before Sharpton did his Harrs interview. This is unethical. It is cheating. To the extent that the interviews were  journalism ( Winfrey used to be a journalist and is still accorded the credibility and status of one, Sharpton pretends to be a journalist rather than what he is, a race-hustler, on MNBC) accepting such payments create a conflict of interest and a breach of journalism ethics. Even if they are not technically unethical journalism, the lack of transparency is.

Winfrey went into high dudgeon over the distinction that she didn’t get any pay-offs to endorse Harris personally: her company was simply paid for the expense of seeming to endorse Harris with a massive campaign event. Oh. Oprah interviewed Harris, avoiding any questions the pathetic Democratic Presidential nominee wouldn’t or couldn’t answer (admittedly a tough chore) out of the goodness of her heart. Never mind: the fact that the whole anointment by O was bought and paid for by Harris should have been disclosed up front. It wasn’t, because everyone would have realized what was going on.

Sharpton’s grift can’t be rationalized away so easily. He works for a news organization (well, it pretends it’s a new organization: a real one would never hire the likes of Al Sharpton), and is supposedly bound by basic journalism ethics. “This kind of entanglement harms the credibility of the journalist, the news organization, and journalism overall, and credibility is difficult to restore,” Rod Hicks, the director of ethics and diversity at the Society of Professional Journalists, told the Washington Free Beacon, the small conservative publication that frequently covers stories the big mainstream media outlets try to bury.  “While Sharpton may not consider himself a journalist, many viewers do.” Sharpton earned the money by conducting a softball interview with Harris on October 20 as part of her final campaign pitch

Many viewers still think of Oprah as speaking truth to power too. Whether she personally profited from helping Harris or it was just her employees and company that were paid, she still was a beneficiary, and it still constitutes a benefit to her that should have been revealed at the outset.

I wonder how much money the Harris campaign offered Joe Rogan? It spent $100,000 to construct a nice, shiny new set for the cheesy “Call Her Daddy” sex podcast, which is presumably shot in the basement of a warehouse somewhere, to make it look more respectable. And that also is a benefit to the podcaster supposedly interviewing Harris without bias or undue influence.

I wouldn’t be surprised, in light of this, that the Harris campaign offered Rogan some incentives to do an interview to their specifications. to her specifications: short, scripted, and rigged. Why wouldn’t it? Maybe because they were worried that Joe would spill the beans, but then the Harris cabal would deny it and call him a liar. He, unlike Oprah and Sharpton, would have been risking professional suicide to accept such a bribe. Oprah could count on the news media to cover for her (as in this embarrassing piece by Variety), and everyone knows Sharpton is a slimeball anyway.

But back to the original question: why haven’t the New York Times, and most of the rest of the news media, covered the ethics story involving the pay-offs to organization connected to Winfrey and Sharpton?

We know why, though, don’t we?

The extent of Kamala Harris’s phoniness and her campaign’s efforts to deceive voters continues to be revealed, even as Democratic spin-artists try to cast her defeat as an indictment of voters. By the time the full story is known and written, assuming some objective historians write it, her candidacy will be recognized as the most cynical and dishonest of them all.