Yes, Kamala Harris should talk to the press more

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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 won’t the Democratic candidate do a proper interview already? This was a common refrain throughout Biden’s 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 advisers’ fears that he would make a gaffe (Biden, we’ve 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 I’ve argued before, the reality is likely less neat—and 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 Harris—who 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, Politico’s 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 “are deeply skeptical, as Biden’s 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,” Politico reported. Also, “there is a line in the movie Bull Durham where Crash Davis, the sage journeyman catcher played by Kevin Costner, tells ‘Nuke’ LaLoosh, the young fireballer portrayed by Tim Robbins, that you never, uh, mess with a winning streak.”

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, Semafor’s Dave Weigel noted in the middle of last week, might be “one reason that you haven’t seen as much media grumbling about access—the outlets paying for the plane are getting facetime”; 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, Trump’s running mate, approached Harris’s plane as they crossed paths in Wisconsin, telling reporters that he wanted to say hi and “ask her why she refuses to answer questions from the media”; yesterday, he did a full-ish Ginsburg on the Sunday shows to hammer home the point. (“Kamala Harris has done as many tough interviews as Tim Walz has battlefield deployments,” 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 Harris’s relative lack of availability. Harris, Trump said, had yet to similarly engage as a candidate because “she’s not smart enough.”

At least some of the grumbling, though, has come from journalists and mainstream media personalities. “Trump is holding a presser today, we interviewed him last week and Vance yesterday and Vance is taking open press questions,” Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin said on Thursday. “Time’s just about up on Harris to avoid this becoming a thing.” The editorial board of the Washington Post argued yesterday that “the media and public have legitimate questions, and she should face them,” adding that “this is a political necessity—Mr. Trump is already turning her avoidance of the media into an attack line.” Also yesterday, the radio host Charlamagne tha God—who has interviewed (and sometimes sparred with) Harris, while supporting her politically—told ABC that she should do more interviews. “It’s the bottom of the ninth inning, right?” Charlamagne said. “I feel like she should be any- and everywhere, having these conversations.”

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 there’ll be time for interviews later. Others suggested self-importance on the media’s part: MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said on air that “reporters understandably—and incorrectly—believe that the most important thing a candidate can do is answer their questions”; on the same network, Michael Steele accused them of “whining.” After Lydia Polgreen, of the Times, called on Harris and Walz to answer more questions as “a journalist and a citizen,” another journalist, David Roberts, responded, “What 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?”

As I’ve 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, O’Donnell was onto something when he argued that just because Trump takes questions comparatively often, he doesn’t necessarily give meaningful answers. (“A lie is not an answer,” O’Donnell said. “Anyone in the news media who tells you that Donald Trump has answered reporters’ questions and Kamala Harris hasn’t is lying to you, and they’re too stupid to know that they’re lying to you.”) And media demands for access can sometimes sound self-important, or rote, or performative.

But this doesn’t 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 candidates’ 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 media’s 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 hands—one 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 people—and to do so on terms that are illuminating, rather than performed—might 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 guarded—but reporters who covered her rise in California politics told my colleague Kevin Lind recently that this hasn’t always been the case. (One, Vic Lee, remembered her as “reachable, available, and very gracious with her time.”) And Walz has very recently done highly illuminating interviews with traditional outlets—as I wrote last week, they’re perhaps the reason he was picked for the ticket. “Politicians are terrible to interview,” Ezra Klein, who recently spoke with Walz for the Times, said last week—but “Walz is one of the five best politicians I’ve ever interviewed because he actually thinks aloud. He is responding to you in the moment in a genuine, conversational way.”

Again, members of the media can’t wish illuminating interviews into being on their own. But we can be more considered when we do get access, and, in its absence, we can—and should—at 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 Biden—his 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 matters—even if it isn’t 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 “you don’t be curious,” adding that any answer would “compromise me and also legally restrict you from publishing them.” Trump’s 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 “a more intense period of foreign interference” 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. “On paper, the potential for a conflict of interest seems obvious,” Grynbaum and Barnes write, but ABC says that Walden “is only involved in the news division’s corporate matters (like budgets and staff size) and that she has no say in editorial decisions.” Walden and her husband are also long-standing donors to Harris. “Other corporate media executives have supported political candidates,” Grynbaum and Barnes note—but the “genuine, enduring friendship” between Harris and Walden is rarer.

• For CJR, Adam Piore goes deep on Mark Thompson’s bid to transform CNN. Thompson has “experience turning around struggling news companies,” and so CNN approaching him made sense in light of its financial troubles—but “his 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,” Piore writes. Thompson said in 2021 that the US TV business was “completely unchanged since the nineteen-eighties” and in “dead trouble” due to shrinking viewership and an inability to engage with smartphone users. Failure, Piore writes, “was a possibility.”

• 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. “She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her,” Sundar Pichai, the company’s current CEO, said. A former product manager at Google told the Times that “she was the tip of all our spears, so to speak,” when it came to funneling ideas to top leadership. “A very kind, very smart and very normal spear.”

New from CJR: Mark Thompson, CNN’s chief executive, is tasked with transforming a struggling network. All he asks is patience.

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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 CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.