When Kamala Harris was running for Vice President in 2020, NBC News made a point of reporting on all the historic firsts she represented. NBC News seemed eager to help her capitalize on her identity in this August 2020 story:

Before Sen. Kamala Harris broke historic barriers in the ivory halls of Congress, and now on the Democratic presidential ticket, she dug into her heritage on Howard University’s campus, one of the most prestigious historically Black colleges in the country.

“She was well-steeped in her heritage both as a woman of Jamaican descent and a woman of South Asian descent,” said Jill Louis, a Dallas-based corporate attorney, who attended Howard with Harris and is one of Harris’ line sisters in Alpha Kappa Alpha, the historically Black sorority. “She would talk about what it was like to have that heritage and how she experienced it.”…

Later in that same story, NBC noted that support from minorities wasn’t guaranteed for Harris, partly because she hadn’t always made her racial identity a central topic. In fact, she seemed to downplay it initially:

…though Harris did not hesitate to share anecdotes and stories from her childhood on the campaign trail, she rarely delved into issues of identity early on. Speaking to The Washington Post last year, Harris said she defined herself as simply “American,” and said she generally did not struggle with issues surrounding her own identity.

“It took Harris a little while during her presidential run to open up about her Indian American heritage and Asian American identity,” Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy and political science professor at the University of California, Riverside, explained. “Part of that might have been due to the harsh treatment that Barack Obama had gotten about his father’s immigrant roots.”

But Harris learned quickly and NBC did too. Not even a week later, NBC News published another story about how Harris’ Indian heritage was an inspiration to “millions” of people:

The political journey of Sen. Kamala Harris, the first vice presidential candidate of Indian origin, has inspired millions of Indians, many of whom lofted banners of congratulations in her ancestral city of Chennai after learning that she had been named the Democratic vice presidential nominee.

The admiration goes both ways. The senator’s extended Indian family, particularly her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was an inspiration for Harris as she rose to the pinnacle of American politics, her uncle Gopalan Balachandran said in an interview at his home in India’s capital, New Delhi.

When Biden won the election, NBC published two stories highlighting the historic firsts Harris represented. This one is mostly a rehash of the earlier stories. This second story published a couple days later (co-written by reporter Sakshi Venkatraman) was full of fresh praise for Harris. There’s also a passing mention of another woman politician with a similar heritage, Nikki Haley:

Harris’ political journey — she was the first person of Indian origin elected attorney general of California and to the Senate —will have an important impact on all women, particularly South Asian women, said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, who was head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division in the Obama administration.

“It is also an important beginning for my young sons and for children of color across our country, who have a role model in her and are watching the doors of America open wider for them,” said Gupta, whose parents immigrated from the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

In addition to Harris, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Nikki Haley, the Republican former governor of South Carolina and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, have also risen to political prominence in recent years.

And needless to say, NBC News rehearsed all of this again when Biden was inaugurated. More glowing coverage about what an inspiring figure Kamala Harris was simply because of her heritage.

So jump forward a couple years and now Nikki Haley is running for president as a Republican. Reporter Sakshi Venkatraman wrote a story last week about Haley’s Indian heritage. See if you can detect a slightly different tone:

Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley has long rejected the idea that the U.S. is a racist country. But when it came time to announce her 2024 candidacy for president on Tuesday, she began by sharing her identity — and a memory of her hometown…

But if Haley, born Nimrata Randhawa to Sikh Punjabi parents, is trying to make inroads with Indian Americans, experts say it’s not working.

She doesn’t represent the community, said Varun Nikore, executive director of the AAPI Victory Alliance, a nonprofit group representing Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. In fact, Nikore said, “there’s a multitude of issues where she specifically and the Republican Party are diametrically opposed to where AAPIs are.”…

Some South Asians say Haley’s on-and-off acknowledgment of her ethnic background is a routine they’re familiar with. Nikore, who has followed Haley’s career since the beginning, says her use of her racial identity often goes hand-in-hand with perpetuating the model minority myth, taking anti-immigration stances and opposing comprehensive education about race in the U.S.

“I think people can see through her much better now than ever before,” Nikore said. “So she can try to talk about her immigrant background, I think it’s going to fall flat.”

First of all, if you’ve been on Twitter in the past week, you may have noticed that seemingly every left-wing writer/journalist on the site has been making a big deal about Nikki Haley’s name. David wrote a whole post about this line of attack here. Her actual birth name is Nimarata Nikki Randhawa but the left is desperate to portray her as some sort of race traitor because she uses her middle name instead of her first name. In fact, they’ve been doing this for so many years that this was fact-checked back in 2021.

Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, was born Nimarata Nikki Randhawa. She has received criticism about not using her first name since as early as 2016, with people claiming she changed her name to “get ahead” in politics.

But Haley hasn’t legally changed her name. She goes by her middle name: Nikki…

Haley has gone by “Nikki” ever since she was born, Haley spokesperson Chaney Denton told USA TODAY.

A 2010 Roll Call article echoed this, noting she was known as Nikki throughout high school even though her yearbook photo listed her full name: “Nimarata Nikki Randhawa.”

So it seems unlikely to be an accident that NBC News left out her middle name when introducing her. “Haley, born Nimrata Randhawa,” Sakshi Venkatraman writes. NBC is intentionally playing into the false story that she changed or anglicized her name by not including her middle name.

Continuing on, we get a flat statement that Haley “doesn’t represent the community” from an activist with AAPI Victory Alliance. What is AAPI Victory Alliance you ask? Well, here’s what their own website says:

AAPI Victory Alliance was formerly AAPI Progressive Action, founded in 2017 by leading progressive voices in the AAPI community, including former commissioners of President Obama’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Varun Nikore, the group’s current directory, used to manage an associated SuperPAC and then took over at the alliance a couple years ago. So it’s literally his job to talk up progressive AAPI candidates and, of course, he’s going to badmouth conservative candidates. Would it have killed NBC to at least mention that he’s not a disinterested, neutral party but a partisan activist? The other person quoted in the story is a Democratic operative:

One South Asian and Democratic commentator agreed. “I think I speak for a whole lot of people in saying that Nikki Haley’s values are not the values of the Indian American community,” Kaivan Shroff tweeted. “She is a deeply cynical and unkind person. Her candidacy is not the kind of representation we should celebrate.”

Don’t bother trying to follow the link because the tweet has been deleted. But for the most part, the whole story is just one partisan actor, Varun Nikore, unloading on Nikky Haley. There’s no alternative perspective offered and no clear identification of his background. That seems a long way from the kind of mostly glowing coverage that Kamala Harris received from NBC News and from this same reporter a couple years ago.