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In 2016, the mainstream media infamously decided that the biggest story of the election was Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state. The New York Times led the obsessive feeding frenzy, with as much front page coverage of Clinton’s emails in one week as all policy issues got in more than two months.
Clinton’s emails as a story outweighed a huge number of Trump scandals of far greater import — not least a string of women who accused him of sexual harassment and assault. NYT’s coverage was obviously ridiculous at the time and looks even worse in hindsight as we’ve learned more about Trump scandals and malfeasance that the media missed back then.
Yet the NYT never apologized to readers or formally reevaluated its 2016 election coverage. And now, the media seems prepared to take a similar approach to Kamala Harris. Only this time the scandal they want to focus on is not email server usage. Instead, Harris’s sin, in the eyes of the mainstream press, is that she is … not being sufficiently deferential to the mainstream press.
Harris, the media insists again and again, will not sit down for interviews with them. This is, first of all, not true. Harris has done numerous media interviews while Trump dodges debates and sit-downs with anyone but his sycophants.
More, the media centering itself as the main story in a presidential campaign where the fate of democracy is in the balance is self-parodic, and self-indicting. It illustrates, and sums up, all the ways in which the press has failed in the Trump era.
Harris is doing the thing the press says she isn’t doing
The “Harris isn’t doing interviews” non-story has been a talking point for talking heads almost from the moment Biden dropped out of the race in late July.
In early August, with Harris’s campaign barely off the ground, Politico ran a piece titled, “Why Harris Isn’t Taking Questions.” Meanwhile, the New York Post — as always, less subtle — openly acknowledged it was amplifying Republican attacks in a piece with the headline, “JD Vance knocks Kamala Harris for not doing any interviews since taking over for Biden.”
The media talking points haven’t changed much over the last couple months. At the end of September, Axios ran a headline that blared “The Harris-Walz Media Strategy: Hide From the Press.” At the beginning of this month, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said he wasn’t ready to vote for Harris, asking, “What’s wrong with asking her to sit down for a one-on-one interview with a serious journalist who will ask some tough but reasonable questions about urgent public policy matters?” (Gail Collins, his fellow columnist, conceded the point.) The St. Louis Post Dispatch recently an editorial with the headline, “Trump is unfit. That doesn't excuse Harris's continued dodging of interviews.”
Then, last Sunday, Politico’s Playbook tweeted, “After avoiding the media for neigh on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is … still largely avoiding the media.”
So, has Harris been ducking the press? Is our republic truly in danger of not knowing what she stands for?
No. And also, ffs, no. Harris has spoken regularly to the press.
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Since she launched her campaign, the vice president has taken questions from reporters at campaign stops and during events with groups like the National Association of Black Journalists. She and Walz did a joint interview on CNN at the end of August. She did an interview with Spanish language radio station Uforia in early September. The ABC News debate was on September 10. The next week she did a sit-down interview with Action News in Pennsylvania.
And over the last couple of weeks, Harris has done a media blitz. She appeared on The View, Howard Stern, and Stephen Colbert, where she cracked a beer with the host. (Watch below.)
Harris also sat down with Alex Cooper on her massively popular podcast Call Her Daddy. Next week, she’s appearing at a Univision town hall. Oh, and she did a major and hard-hitting interview with 60 Minutes.
Trump was also scheduled for a 60 Minutes interview, but he ducked out at the last minute.
“He complained that we’d factcheck the interview. We factcheck every story,” 60 Minutes host Scott Pelley explained. (Watch below.)
Harris also wanted to do a second debate — but Trump refused. Instead, he’s focused on appearing with sycophantic goons like Hugh Hewitt.
On Monday, Trump went on Hewitt’s show and indulged in grotesque, overt, eugenic racism, insisting that migrants are dangerous to the US because they have “bad genes.” (Watch below.)
Trump is backing out of interviews and refusing debates. You’d think that the media would excoriate him for dodging serious questions.
And yet, you don’t see Politico rushing to denounce Trump for failing to reach out to swing voters or refusing to answer tough questions. Instead, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins blithely insists in that aforementioned discussion with fellow columnist Bret Stephens, the media feels they “have a right to hold [Harris] to a higher standard.”
Trump is going to Trump, the media feels, and how can you criticize Trump for being Trump? Only Harris can really be faulted for not doing interviews. Even if she is doing interviews.
Collins (like Politico) insists that while Harris may be doing interviews, she’s not doing the right interviews — that is, “serious interviews with national reporters.” The implication is that local reporters, Spanish-language outlets, and podcasters lack the secret sauce of knowledge and professionalism which Gail Collins and Bret Stephens have as the lucky holders of Times sinecures. Only the NYT and Politico can really vet presidential candidates, according to the NYT and Politico.
This self-serving narrative is obviously ridiculous. As Jen Psaki pointed out, NYT and Politico are cranky not because they reach more people than Call Her Daddy (they don’t) and not because they will ask harder hitting questions than 60 Minutes. Rather, they are cranky because “their relevance relies on being the sole arbiters of asking the questions.” But in the current media ecosystem, people have lots of options that are not the NYT and Politico. And that makes the NYT and Politico sad.
Thirsty for a “basket of deplorables” moment
In addition, mainstream media outlets feel that nontraditional interviews don’t count because they are not focused on news.
Mainstream outlets have an audience primarily composed of political junkies who follow the horserace closely. The outlets and their audience already know candidate backgrounds and positions for the most part. They are tuning in to find out the next big development and the next scandal.
That’s why the media doesn’t complain about Trump dodging interviews. Trump generates news even in friendly interviews. He can be counted on to vomit out gutter racism to lickspittle vassal Hugh Hewitt, allowing mainstream outlets to churn out a bland article about it before moving on to the next thing.
Harris, on the other hand, is more disciplined. When she does interviews, she stays on message and explains her policies.
When she was asked how she’s going to lower the cost of living on the Call Her Daddy podcast, for example, she went through a list of her proposals, including increasing housing supply, downpayment assistance for first time home buyers, and a $6,000 tax credit for parents for the first year of a child’s life. This sort of straightforward discussion of priorities and goals is informative and helpful for voters, especially those who don’t follow politics closely. It’s not very exciting for politics junkies, though, who view the election as entertainment and blood sport.
What is exciting for politics junkies? Well, Bill Whitaker in his 60 Minutes interview with Harris provided some clues. During the sit down, he asked Harris, “You have called [Trump] a racist and divisive. Yet Donald Trump has the support of millions and millions of Americans. How do you explain that?” (Watch below.)
The game here is to try to get Harris to say something inflammatory about Trump supporters that can be used as a headline, like Hillary Clinton did with her “basket of deplorables” remark. To do that, Whitaker suggests that the real scandal isn’t Trump saying horrible racist shit that many of his fans agree with, but pointing out that horrible racist shit is horrible. More, he pushes Harris to condemn not just Trump, but Trump voters, framing his question as if it’s impossible or unthinkable that millions of people support a racist. (Harris of course declined to say that Trump’s supporters are all racists.)
These are supposedly tough questions not because they force the candidate to explain their positions or to demonstrate knowledge. The questions are “tough” because they push to create news and to get the candidate to acquiesce in a damaging narrative. Again, Whitaker isn’t really trying to inform his audience; he assumes they’re already informed. He’s trying to make news by getting Harris to say something controversial.
Is it news when Trump is Trump?
The mainstream media’s obsession with “news” and gaffes is longstanding. But it has never been a very useful approach to election coverage, and it’s worse than useless in the Trump era. Among other problems, Trump says racist, ugly, shocking things so consistently, and with such frequency, that it effectively ceases to be news — and therefore the mainstream press ceases to cover it.
Again, Trump’s history of sexual violence is an obvious example. A jury held Trump liable for sexually assaulting writer E. Jean Carroll last year — an assault the judge characterized as rape.
The media could (and should) inform its audience that one of the candidates for president has been held liable for sexual assault and for defaming his victim while claiming he wants to be a “protector” of women. But the Carroll verdict is hardly mentioned in mainstream coverage over the last months. That’s because from the perspective of the mainstream media, it’s not news. The very fact that Trump has been accused of sexual harassment and assault throughout his public career has made it old news, and therefore not worth covering.
“Trump is a monster” is just the accepted status quo. To make news, Trump would have to do something really outrageous, like momentarily behave like a decent human being.
By contrast, Harris rarely says inflammatory things, and so the mainstream media constantly tries to get her to say inflammatory things. When she won’t, they make up scandals — in this case, that she refuses to sit down with mainstream media and say scandalous things. Trump is rewarded for constantly saying irresponsible lies and spreading hate. Harris is punished for not lying enough and not spreading enough hate.
It's not surprising that, given this dynamic, Harris is interested in talking to Stephen Colbert, or Alex Cooper, or really anyone who is not the news-obsessed, ethically-contorted mainstream media. Gail Collins, Politico, 60 Minutes, the New York Times — they’ve all spent years demonstrating that their focus on both sides horserace news is uniquely ill-suited for informing the electorate about a fascist threat.
Harris doesn’t have any obligation to help the mainstream media hand the election to Trump again. On the contrary, she has a responsibility to find better ways to talk to the American people about the threat we face.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
She owes them NOTHING. MSM continues to fail daily. It’s despicable.
Amen a few hundred times. I dumped my NY Times sub after 2016. My WaPo sub runs out this winter. Noah has eloquently explained why I don't and won't miss either one of them. I continue to subscribe to the Guardian (both US and UK editions) and to quite a few Substacks. I know how to get more info when I need it. Harris and Walz are raising the bar for journalists, and so far this seems to piss most of them off. The 1st Amendment says that *Congress* shall make no law abridging freedom of the press, but it doesn't prevent the press from sinking under the weight of its own incompetence.