In the three weeks since President Joe Biden announced that he would not seek reelection, the presidential race, you may have noticed, has been turned on its head: Vice President Kamala Harris, who succeeded Biden atop the ticket, has been drawing huge crowds alongside her new running mate, Tim Walz; the polls have shifted; so have the vibes, as I noted last week. And yet one narrative around the campaign is familiar: Why wonât the Democratic candidate do a proper interview already? This was a common refrain throughout Bidenâs reelection bid and, indeed, his presidency as a whole; he has, famously, done far fewer sit-down interviews and formal press conferences than any recent predecessor, to the chagrin of those covering him. (His team has often responded that Biden has regularly taken questions en route to and from engagements.)
Over the years, observers have posited some Biden-specific reasons for his apparent reluctance to engage with the traditional media, from his advisersâ fears that he would make a gaffe (Biden, weâve long been told, is a gaffe machine) to, especially in more recent times, the allegation that his team wanted to hide his advanced age and deteriorating job performance. But, as Iâve argued before, the reality is likely less neatâand in many respects, more universal than specific to Biden himself. In the modern era, politicians of all stripes have less incentive to subject themselves to sharp scrutiny from a news media whose influence is waning (or is often said to be), especially given the ample means now at their disposal to spread a more controlled message, be that directly on social media or via friendly interlocutors.
These factors certainly apply to Harrisâwho has, to cite her own specifics, been burned by bad interviews in the past and is now, many would say, enjoying a bump of free messaging publicity from the traditional media, without having to engage much to get it. Last Wednesday, Politicoâs West Wing Playbook newsletter noted that Harris has not yet done any sort of formal interview or presser since she ascended to the top of the ticket, and assessed the reasons why. Her top aides âare deeply skeptical, as Bidenâs inner circle was, that doing big interviews with major TV networks or national newspapers offer [sic] much real upside when it comes to reaching swing voters,â Politico reported. Also, âthere is a line in the movie Bull Durham where Crash Davis, the sage journeyman catcher played by Kevin Costner, tells âNukeâ LaLoosh, the young fireballer portrayed by Tim Robbins, that you never, uh, mess with a winning streak.â
Like Biden, Harris has since taken questions from reporters between campaign stops; unlike Biden, she has, per Politico, spoken routinely with journalists on her plane, albeit without going on the record. This, Semaforâs Dave Weigel noted in the middle of last week, might be âone reason that you haven’t seen as much media grumbling about accessâthe outlets paying for the plane are getting facetimeâ; other observers noted a paucity of grumbling, too, at least compared with the pressure put on Biden to submit to interviewers. Still, there was some grumbling, and in recent days, it seems to have grown louder. Much of it, it should be noted, has come from the Trump campaign and its allies. On the day that Politico published its story, J.D. Vance, Trumpâs running mate, approached Harrisâs plane as they crossed paths in Wisconsin, telling reporters that he wanted to say hi and âask her why she refuses to answer questions from the mediaâ; yesterday, he did a full-ish Ginsburg on the Sunday shows to hammer home the point. (âKamala Harris has done as many tough interviews as Tim Walz has battlefield deployments,â he tweeted afterward, rolling two attack lines into one.) In between times, Trump himself convened a press conference at Mar-a-Lago that, per the Times, was intended to highlight Harrisâs relative lack of availability. Harris, Trump said, had yet to similarly engage as a candidate because âsheâs not smart enough.â
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At least some of the grumbling, though, has come from journalists and mainstream media personalities. âTrump is holding a presser today, we interviewed him last week and Vance yesterday and Vance is taking open press questions,â Semaforâs Benjy Sarlin said on Thursday. âTimeâs just about up on Harris to avoid this becoming a thing.â The editorial board of the Washington Post argued yesterday that âthe media and public have legitimate questions, and she should face them,â adding that âthis is a political necessityâMr. Trump is already turning her avoidance of the media into an attack line.â Also yesterday, the radio host Charlamagne tha Godâwho has interviewed (and sometimes sparred with) Harris, while supporting her politicallyâtold ABC that she should do more interviews. âIt’s the bottom of the ninth inning, right?â Charlamagne said. âI feel like she should be any- and everywhere, having these conversations.â
But not all journalists and media personalities felt this way. Some pushed back on the notion that Harris should prioritize speaking with the media, noting, among other things, that she has been genuinely busy tooling up a presidential campaign at double-quick speed, and that thereâll be time for interviews later. Others suggested self-importance on the mediaâs part: MSNBCâs Lawrence OâDonnell said on air that âreporters understandablyâand incorrectlyâbelieve that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer their questionsâ; on the same network, Michael Steele accused them of âwhining.â After Lydia Polgreen, of the Times, called on Harris and Walz to answer more questions as âa journalist and a citizen,â another journalist, David Roberts, responded, âWhat does it tell you that no one but the reporters who have a professional interest in this seems to think that we’d learn anything illuminating at all from such an interview?â
As Iâve written in the past with reference to Biden, access to a politician should not be seen as the be-all and end-all. What journalists do with their access matters (when Biden finally did a press conference in 2021, after weeks of media clamoring, many of the questions he faced were not very illuminating at all), and access is not a precondition of insight; sometimes, the former can even obscure the latter. Speaking on MSNBC, OâDonnell was onto something when he argued that just because Trump takes questions comparatively often, he doesnât necessarily give meaningful answers. (âA lie is not an answer,â OâDonnell said. âAnyone in the news media who tells you that Donald Trump has answered reportersâ questions and Kamala Harris hasnât is lying to you, and theyâre too stupid to know that theyâre lying to you.â) And media demands for access can sometimes sound self-important, or rote, or performative.
But this doesnât mean that demands for access are self-important, or rote, or performative in themselves. At the most basic level I agree with Polgreen, and others have argued that the Democratic ticket should do more interviews and press conferences, because these remain the best forum we have for stress-testing candidatesâ positions and holding them to account. And if access demands can sometimes come across as performative, the world of professionalized politics, with its fetishization of message discipline, is vastly more so. The incentive structure that leads many leading politicians to dodge formal sit-downs with the media is partly the mediaâs creation, to the extent that journalists sometimes ask them trivial questions and overplay optically bad moments in subsequent coverage. But it is, mostly, out of our handsâone consequence of an often risk-averse political culture meeting an information climate whose gates we no longer keep, if we ever did.
And yet, as naive as it might seem, there are some compelling reasons to hope that our pull to interview powerful peopleâand to do so on terms that are illuminating, rather than performedâmight survive this incentive structure, or even conform to it. The more tough interviews a politician does, the less high-stakes each becomes; politicians can use this setting, too, to familiarize themselves and their policies to voters, and show them that they can handle pressure. As for the Harris-Walz ticket, specifically, Harris can seem guardedâbut reporters who covered her rise in California politics told my colleague Kevin Lind recently that this hasnât always been the case. (One, Vic Lee, remembered her as âreachable, available, and very gracious with her time.â) And Walz has very recently done highly illuminating interviews with traditional outletsâas I wrote last week, theyâre perhaps the reason he was picked for the ticket. âPoliticians are terrible to interview,â Ezra Klein, who recently spoke with Walz for the Times, said last weekâbut âWalz is one of the five best politicians Iâve ever interviewed because he actually thinks aloud. He is responding to you in the moment in a genuine, conversational way.â
Again, members of the media canât wish illuminating interviews into being on their own. But we can be more considered when we do get access, and, in its absence, we canâand shouldâat least ask for it. On Thursday, as calls for Harris to do more press started to get louder, she did take some questions between stops, as I noted above; she only did so for about seventy seconds, but one reporter took the opportunity to ask when she might engage in greater depth and Harris said she was keen to organize a proper interview by the end of the month. This, of course, was hardly an impressive promise; in reality, Harris might only be incentivized to turn to traditional media venues when she perceives that her honeymoon period in the race is waning and she could use some eyeballs. But her answer was, like the question that elicited it, a start.
Not that Harris and Walz are the only Democrats whose media strategies matter at the moment. Yesterday, CBS broadcast a sit-down with Bidenâhis first since passing Harris the torch. The last time he did such an interview, his every word was scrutinized for signs of frailty, and discussion of his media strategy felt urgently relevant. The stakes this time felt lower. But Biden doing the interview should have been as welcome now as it was when he was still running. He is, after all, still the president, and access to the president mattersâeven if it isnât everything.
Other notable stories:
- Over the weekend, Politico reported that it had recently received emails from an anonymous account sharing documents from inside the Trump campaign, including a research dossier on Vance; when Politico asked the source how the documents were obtained, they suggested that âyou donât be curious,â adding that any answer would âcompromise me and also legally restrict you from publishing them.â Trumpâs campaign has now claimed that it was hacked by a foreign actor, citing a recent warning from Microsoft that Iranian hackers had targeted a presidential campaign official, though Politico has not yet been able to verify that this is how these documents were obtained. The Times, which also received documents, notes that we may be entering âa more intense period of foreign interferenceâ in the election, but that the details remain murky for now.
- Also for the Times, Michael M. Grynbaum and Brooks Barnes examine the close relationship between Harris and Dana Walden, a top executive at Disney whose purview includes ABC News, which will host a debate between Harris and Trump next month. âOn paper, the potential for a conflict of interest seems obvious,â Grynbaum and Barnes write, but ABC says that Walden âis only involved in the news divisionâs corporate matters (like budgets and staff size) and that she has no say in editorial decisions.â Walden and her husband are also long-standing donors to Harris. âOther corporate media executives have supported political candidates,â Grynbaum and Barnes noteâbut the âgenuine, enduring friendshipâ between Harris and Walden is rarer.
- For CJR, Adam Piore goes deep on Mark Thompsonâs bid to transform CNN. Thompson has âexperience turning around struggling news companies,â and so CNN approaching him made sense in light of its financial troublesâbut âhis agreeing to take the role was, perhaps, less obvious; even for an executive of his experience, CNN posed any number of vexing challenges that could blemish his reputation as a turnaround artist,â Piore writes. Thompson said in 2021 that the US TV business was âcompletely unchanged since the nineteen-eightiesâ and in âdead troubleâ due to shrinking viewership and an inability to engage with smartphone users. Failure, Piore writes, âwas a possibility.â
- In international media news, a court in the Philippines ordered officials to restore the business license of the independent news site Rappler, which had been revoked in 2018 under government pressure. Elsewhere, Channel 13, a broadcaster in Israel, reversed its decision to appoint a reported ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as its CEO, after she was recorded criticizing journalists and staff complained. And, according to Sky News in the UK, Boris Johnson could be in line for a high-ranking role at the Telegraph, where he was once a journalist, if a political ally succeeds in buying the paper.
- And Susan Wojcicki, a key figure in the growth of Google who went on to serve as CEO of YouTube, has died. She was fifty-six and had been diagnosed with cancer. âShe is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and itâs hard to imagine the world without her,â Sundar Pichai, the companyâs current CEO, said. A former product manager at Google told the Times that âshe was the tip of all our spears, so to speak,â when it came to funneling ideas to top leadership. âA very kind, very smart and very normal spear.â
New from CJR: Mark Thompson, CNNâs chief executive, is tasked with transforming a struggling network. All he asks is patience.
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJRâs newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.