Harris Doesn’t Care What Politico Thinks

Doing it her way

Kamala Harris has done a lot of interviews this week. You’d think this would appease the corporate-owned Beltway press corps which has, almost since the Vice President launched her campaign, been criticizing her for not talking to the journalists more.

But they will not be appeased so, once again, they’ve moved the goalposts.

On Sunday, the day Vice President Harris did an interview with 60 Minutes—an interview Donald had also agreed to do, but canceled when the show said there would be fact-checking (think about the implications of that for a second)—Politico Playbook’s daily dispatch open by claiming, bizarrely, that Harris is “still largely avoiding the media. The VP is set for a series of interviews that likely won’t press her on tough issues, even as voters want more specifics.”

It turns out, though, it’s not that Harris isn’t doing enough interviews, it’s that she’s doing the wrong kind of interviews.

Let’s be real here: Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris. Instead, expect most of these sit-downs to be a continuation of the “vibes” campaign Harris has perfected.

After years of abdicating its journalistic responsibility by showering the man who calls them “the enemy of the people” with billions of dollars in unearned media, and failing to cover even his most egregious conduct with the scrutiny it deserves, the corporate media has decided to get tough with Kamala Harris just as they did with President Biden. It’s as if they think we won’t notice the double-standard. But we do.

A few hours after that article posted, Harris’ interview on the Call Her Daddy podcast, one of the most popular podcasts in the country, went public. It was a lengthy and substantive discussion about the issues, like reproductive health, affecting women in America, the kind of interview that helps viewers understand the impact policies have on their lives.

In addition to 60 Minutes and her appearance on Call Her Daddy, Kamala Harris will sit down with Stephen Colbert, the hosts of The View, and Howard Stern. She’ll also participate in a town hall being held by Univision. Her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, went on Fox News Sunday. It’s hard to imagine a more well-rounded and diverse media strategy than the one Harris and her team are employing. 

And that’s the problem—at least from the perspective of a still white-male dominated industry that considers itself the sine qua non of political discourse. Because Kamala Harris refuses to kiss the rings of those corporate media masters, a refusal they cannot fathom or accept, they seek to tear her down.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, a fascist who is running an essentially policy-free campaign, remains in his safe place, appearing almost exclusively with enablers like Hugh Hewitt and Sean Hannity, who allow him to ramble incoherently and spew his hateful, racist rhetoric without any intervention or pushback.

On Monday, Rob Flaherty, Harris’ deputy campaign manager, wrote in a Twitter post,

“Baseline facts:

• People have more content choices than ever

• If you consume political info, you want to consume political info

• Most of the remaining voters we need to talk to don’t

That trad press don’t get this sorta . . . speaks to the reason why this fact pattern exists!”

In other words, the mainstream media have created their own self-referential bubble. It simply does not occur to them that any interview Harris conducts with non-traditional, independent media can have any value.

Former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer noted in his newsletter Monday that “interviews on traditional platforms like CNN and MSNBC reach almost no persuadable voters. . . . They are internal conversations among political junkies who made their decisions years ago. This is reality; and too many in the Beltway media are unwilling to grasp it.” 

Harris has no interest in pacifying the beltway crowd. She’s trying to win an election. And if speaking to the networks and The New York Times and the rest of corporate media were an effective way for the Vice President to reach the voters who can help her win, then she’d be doing interviews with them, too.

But they aren’t. And everyone seems to know this except them.

“If data suggested that doing an ABC interview every day until election day would reach the voters needed to win, both campaigns would probably do it,” Maxwell Tani, Semafor’s media editor wrote on Twitter. “The fact that they decided to spend this much time doing podcasts says more about national media’s reach than anything else.” 

The corporate-owned media are no longer masters of the universe. Much like Donald, they are increasingly irrelevant. Instead of looking inward and trying to figure out how to change, they double-down and lose even more ground.

Kamala Harris is a threat to the old way of doing things, which is yet another reason to vote for her.