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“She’s not sitting down for regular interviews or fielding questions from the press, certainly not to the degree that her counterpart, Donald Trump, is.” “She’s a very busy person.” “I think she should be doing more. This is the most exhaustive oral exam for any job on the planet because it’s for the most important job on the planet, and part of it is unscripted interactions.” “Kamala Harris is not running for perfect; she’s running against Trump.” “I don’t think it’s a lot to ask for her to sit down for a real interview, as opposed to a puff piece in which she describes her feelings of growing up in Oakland with nice lawns.” “When you move to nirvana, give me your real estate broker’s number and I’ll be your nextdoor neighbor. We don’t live there.” “I talk to swing state voters all day.… They’re not here for the soft interviews.… She needs more interviews.” “People should not read too much into what some have described as a shortage or a lack of interviews in the first six weeks of the campaign.”
Bar the time window mentioned at the end, this back-and-forth as to whether Kamala Harris should do more media interviews—all of it from the past few days—could have been lifted from a newsletter I wrote over a month ago, when that debate started to ramp up among commentators: some argued that Harris was dodging scrutiny (and opening herself up to political attacks in the process); others countered that Harris doesn’t need the press to get her message out and that the calls for her to do more interviews were less a function of high-minded concern for accountability and more one of self-absorbed elite-media whining. If that debate never quite went away in between times, it got a renewed jolt of energy last week—not least due to a story in Axios bearing the headline “The Harris-Walz media strategy: Hide from the press” (and an illustration reinforcing the point). By Axios’s count, since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, in July, Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, had taken part in seven interviews or press conferences, compared with Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s combined seventy-two. Harris personally was credited with just three interviews: one on local TV, one on national TV, and one with a national print outlet.
Axios acknowledged, though, that this was not an exhaustive count: it excluded interviews that candidates have given to what it termed “partisan-leaning commentators.” An interview that Walz did with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow was explicitly left out; so too, it would appear, were radio interviews that Harris conducted with two Spanish-language hosts (Edna Chapa, a/k/a “Angel Baby,” and Stephanie Himonidis, a/k/a “Chiquibaby”) as well as two Black broadcasters (Rickey Smiley and Jessica Williams, a/k/a Ms. Jessica). On the day that the Axios story was published, Harris participated in a part rally, part town hall hosted by Oprah Winfrey, who has endorsed Harris and spoke on her behalf at the Democratic National Convention. Following the Chiquibaby interview, the New York Times described it as “breezy.” Ahead of the Oprah event, CNN’s Brian Stelter predicted that it would be “relaxing” (at least to some extent).
In the end, the Times’ review of the event left a different impression. (At least at times, “Winfrey did what she does best: orchestrating an interview that connects with everyday Americans whose experiences illustrate the strife of a country craving empathy,” Erica L. Green wrote. “The discussions were heavy at times, with members of the audience—in person and at home—in tears.”) Harris also sat down last week with three reporters from the National Association of Black Journalists—which was broadcast live on the major cable networks—and with the tech magazine Wired. As the headline on Stelter’s piece noted, Harris “is doing more press interviews, if you look closely.”
The last time I wrote about the Harris-interviews controversy, I concluded that she should submit to more of them because they remain “the best forum we have for stress-testing candidates’ positions and holding them to account”—but also that mainstream-media access to a politician isn’t the be-all and end-all, since what we choose to do with the access matters most. (I also wrote that while Trump might do more interviews by the numbers, his answers to questions are often mendacious and/or meaningless—a point that bears repeating but that I won’t otherwise get back into here.) A closer look at some of the interviews that Harris has done since then ultimately reinforces these points, but also reveals a nuanced picture. Harris still isn’t doing anywhere near enough interviews that involve the genuine stress-testing of her positions. But the traditional press doesn’t have a monopoly over these; nor has it had a monopoly over the insightful moments in the interviews that Harris has done. Sometimes, the lines dividing journalistic interlocutors and friendlier ones are blurrier than the former might like to admit.
This isn’t to say that the lines don’t exist. Smiley’s interview with Harris, for example, was short, cheery, and punctuated by some decidedly soft questions. (“The fast pace of this historic campaign has been amazing to watch.… When do you get an opportunity to sleep?”) The NABJ session, by contrast, was much longer, tougher, and more substantive. The interviewers—WHYY’s Tonya Mosley, TheGrio’s Gerren Keith Gaynor, and Politico’s Eugene Daniels—pressed her on a range of topics, from the war in Gaza to the possibility of reparations for slavery, and repeatedly pushed for firm answers when Harris rambled.
But even those two, very different interviews opened with fairly similar prompts. (Daniels: Are voters better off now than they were four years ago? Smiley: Please address the people concerned that you won’t do enough to help those struggling with the everyday cost of living.) Harris faced questions about her specific border-policy plans in her first major TV interview as a candidate, with CNN’s Dana Bash, and also from a member of the crowd at the Oprah event last week; when Harris wandered, both Bash and Oprah reiterated the question. One of those two sit-downs featured endless trailers teasing an intimate personal account of the moment Harris learned that Biden was dropping out of the race; the other spawned a perceived Harris gaffe that was subsequently chewed over on Meet the Press. You’ve probably guessed by now that I’m referring to CNN and Oprah in that order. (Harris said during the latter event that “if somebody breaks in my house, they’re getting shot,” before adding, “I probably should not have said that, but my staff will deal with that later.” Her staff said she was joking. On Meet the Press, the Democratic senator John Fetterman argued that “the vast majority of Americans would agree” with what Harris said.)
The more you think about it, the more complicated it becomes to set hard-and-fast criteria by which one might define an “interview” with Harris. Her sit-down with Wired is a case in point. Wired is a highly respected and substantive publication that I, for one, would certainly define as being part of the mainstream media. And yet Harris spoke to the publication not for a rigorous grilling on tech policy but as part of its “Autocomplete Interview” series, in which celebrities address the popular prompts that come up when you type their name into Google; rather than a human interviewer, Harris faced a piece of cardboard with peel-off strips. And yet none of this is to knock the format, which, as well as being fun, can itself be illuminating and (at least in a certain chaotic sense) democratic. One of the questions Harris faced from Google—“what does kamala harris stand for?”—is, perhaps, the whole ballgame this cycle.
Again, none of this to conflate tough questions with softballs or independent journalists with partisans. By far the best interview I’ve seen with Harris was the NABJ one, in which professional reporters posed thoughtful questions and followed up on them; to the extent that Harris has mostly dodged that type of setting, it’s been a decision rooted in political self-interest, and, while elite-media hand-wringing about that fact can be annoying, the root fear behind it—that politicians these days would rather natter with a TikTok influencer than submit to a grilling by a trained reporter (and face limited consequences for this preference)—is a real one. But the end goals should always be scrutiny and insight, and if those are achieved, it doesn’t much matter to me who draws it out. As I’ve written at length, opinionated cable hosts are capable of doing illuminating, and sometimes genuinely tough, interviews—just as supposedly independent mainstream journalists often do interviews that amount to little more than opportunities for politicians to spew sound bites. It perhaps makes the most sense to judge the scrutiny to which Harris is opening herself on a case-by-case basis, or on a scale, not in terms of an interview/not-an-interview dichotomy.
And, even if you think that only traditional journalists are likely to apply this kind of scrutiny, Harris is reportedly planning to ramp up her engagement with them as the campaign enters its final stretch. The Times and others have reported that her media strategy will continue to focus most heavily on interviewers from local and niche outlets, perhaps because they are less likely to ask follow-ups—but that doesn’t have to be the case; local interviewers can hit hard, while niche outlets can sometimes be more substantive than their generalist counterparts, as the Washington Post’s Perry Bacon Jr. pointed out in an astute column last month. And Harris does seem set to appear again in at least some major national venues. According to Axios, she is in talks to appear on 60 Minutes next month, back to back with Trump. She is also pushing anew for a second debate with Trump (which, it should be noted, is a form of mainstream-media interview) and, per Stelter, may do town-hall style events if Trump refuses to show up.
One of the quotes that I shared at the top of this newsletter—that “people should not read too much into what some have described as a shortage or a lack of interviews in the first six weeks of the campaign”—came from Brian Fallon, a top Harris aide, who told Politico’s Daniels last week that Harris is entering a stretch of the campaign where she will do more “battleground state media” but also “mix in” national outlets. Fallon added that prior to becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris did dozens of national interviews this year, describing that as “a default setting for Kamala Harris in terms of media engagement” and predicting that the remainder of the campaign “will look like…something closer to that.” Journalists should hold Harris to that promise. If she keeps it, they should think very carefully about how they’re using their time with her. Even if she doesn’t, we should entertain the possibility that she is doing interviews.
Other notable stories:
- Violence continues to escalate between Israel and Hezbollah: after Israel detonated the latter’s communications devices last week, it bombed a building in Beirut on Friday; over the weekend, Hezbollah fired rockets deep into Israel; this morning, Israel struck hundreds of sites inside Lebanon, killing at least a hundred people and injuring many more, according to Lebanese health officials. The story is developing. Meanwhile, Israeli forces stormed Al Jazeera’s offices in the West Bank city of Ramallah early yesterday morning, ordering employees to evacuate and confiscating equipment before sealing the entrance. Al Jazeera said that Israeli officials hit the bureau with a forty-five-day closure order. Israeli authorities previously moved to shut down Al Jazeera’s operations inside Israel, as Ayodeji Rotinwa has reported for CJR.
- Fallout continues from last week’s revelation that New York magazine suspended Olivia Nuzzi, a star political reporter, following an alleged romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (Nuzzi has said that the relationship was never physical.) The Daily Beast’s Corbin Bolies reports that David Haskell, New York’s top editor, learned that Kennedy had been bragging about the relationship and confronted Nuzzi, who initially denied it before coming clean. Ryan Lizza, a top journalist at Politico who was engaged to Nuzzi, said that he won’t be involved in any coverage of Kennedy going forward. And Business Insider’s Peter Kafka spoke with Oliver Darcy, the media reporter who “agonized” over the story before breaking it. (He is friends with Nuzzi.)
- Late last week, CNN’s Stelter reported that Robert Samuel, a veteran executive producer on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, was fired recently following allegations of sexual harassment. Stelter also reports that Caren Bohan has been appointed as the new permanent editor of USA Today, having previously filled the role on an interim basis following the abrupt departure of Terence Samuel earlier this year. And in other media-business news, Semafor’s Max Tani profiled The Bulwark, a never-Trump conservative outlet that is “one of the breakout media successes of the 2024 election,” thanks in no small part to its surging popularity on YouTube.
- For CJR, Joel Simon reports on a settlement between the New York Police Department and several photojournalists who sued it on First Amendment grounds, alleging that officers harassed, arrested, or assaulted them while they were covering protests in the city. The agreement “is part of a series of lawsuits, settlements, and legislation that is redefining the relationship between the police and journalists covering protests,” Simon writes—and yet, “despite the shift, journalists covering protests continue to face arrests, attacks, and other abuses of their rights.”
- And the Washington Post’s Josh Rogin spoke with Dimitri Simes, a dual US and Russian citizen who hosts a show on Russian state TV and has now been charged in the US with violating sanctions amid a broader legal crackdown on Russian influence operations. “Innocent or guilty,” Rogin writes, “his prosecution raises real questions about fighting foreign influence by targeting journalists working for overseas news outlets—even if they are spreading what looks like propaganda.”
ICYMI: California journalists on covering Kamala Harris
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