The Media Research Center labored hard to portray Kamala Harris as being afraid of the media because she didn’t do interviews immediately after becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. When Harris came close to an interview, Tim Graham spent an Aug. 27 post further building up that framing:
It’s been five weeks and counting since Kamala Harris emerged as the Democrat [sic] nominee and we’re still waiting for her to submit to her first sit-down interview with the press. She promised to get an interview “scheduled” by the end of August (or Saturday). It’s been a while — she was on Morning Joe two months ago to talk up abortion “access.”
In Tuesday’s Politico Playbook column, the reporters reported on how reporters are being asked which reporter should be selected for this weighty task.
Asking reporters about how to run your campaign is a classic suck-up tactic, since reporters think they are the smartest political strategists in America. It’s not just Democrats that play this game: then-Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter once praised Republican John McCain for talking to reporters about presidential campaign strategy out on the trail.
[…]The real goal is the perception of a substantive interview with a journalist who will gently keep Harris from putting her words in the salad shooter.
Graham concluded by sneering: “‘Harris World is also worrying about how to deploy her running mate Tim Walz in the media, because ‘he might not have a full command of where Harris is on every issue.’ They don’t think the main problem is having to explain his bucket of lies about his own resume??”
Curtis Houck ramped up the sneering after an interviewer had been chosen:
CNN announced on Tuesday during The Situation Room that they had won the unofficial sweepstakes between the liberal media broadcast and cable networks to score the first sit-down interview with the uber-sheltered Vice President Kamala Harris since she was coronated the Democrat Party’s presidential candidate on July 21 after President Biden was forced out.
Chief political correspondent Dana Bash will conduct the interview and, with running mate Tim Walz sitting in (as a crutch), it will be taped Thursday for a primetime special at 9:00 p.m. Eastern.
Houck then took shots at CNN political director David Chalian for sharing the news:
Chalian sounded like the liberal tool that he’s always been, gushing over this as the “next sort of important hurdle for Kamala Harris and her campaign to jump, which is after a very successful six weeks here since she became the Democratic nominee, coalesced the party behind her, raised a ton of money, injected enthusiasm, got a running mate, pulled off a convention”.
Chalian saw no reason to criticize Harris for avoiding the press, simply observing that Thursday will be “the first time she’s going to take questions in a — in a concerted effort like this, in an interview format since Joe Biden, six weeks ago, upended this entire race by making that historic decision to bow out of his campaign, endorse his Vice President, Kamala Harris, and that sent her on to these lasts six weeks here.”
[…]As for what issues Bash will discuss, Chalian argued that the questions (read: softballs) will include “the most important issues, time and again in every poll, the economy is number one above all, the cost of living, those are things that Kamala Harris herself addressed in that speech in North Carolina a couple of weeks ago, but to flesh that out, no doubt.”
You know who else seeks out interviewers with softball questions? Graham and Houck, as well as other MRC staffers. They only appear on right-wing channels like Newsmax, where they are guaranteed never to be asked about their rampant bias and shoddy “media research.” Indeed, Graham pretty much bailed on appearing in non-right-wing media after John Avlon wiped the floor with him in a 2016 CNN interview.
Then it was work-the-refs time — yet it had to work hard to smear Bash. An Aug. 28 post by Bill D’Agostino conceded that “Bash surprised just about everyone during the first (and only) presidential debate between Biden and Trump” — “everyone” being D’Agostino’s hateful MRC co-workers — by not playing into the MRC’s biased caricature of her and co-moderator, framing them as being “were remarkably reserved.” But the refs must be worked even if reality shows otherwise, and he does just that:
This upcoming Harris event, however, could be a different story. In interviews like the one planned for Thursday, the journalist is supposed to play the role of the stand-in opponent, pressing the candidate on their policy stances, their vision, and perhaps even their past gaffes. In this kind of role, Bash has a much longer record for us to examine, and it’s not stellar.
[…]Bash is prone to asking Democrats questions that sound like hardballs for Republicans. For example, she recently teed up Commerce Secretary Pete Buttigieg to excoriate Republican VP Candidate JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment (“What’s your response to that?”).
She played the same game with Senator Laphonza Butler (D-CA) on August 4 of this year, offering her guest free rein to lambast Trump for his comments about Harris’s ethnicity:
Alex Christy served up the kind of ref-working he did before the first debate by cranking out “a wide variety of 30 questions that Bash could ask that might actually help voters make an informed choice in a couple of months.” Far from being a “wide variety,” they were devised to amplify right-wing narratives such as:
- Should death row inmates have the right to vote?
- How can you secure the border when you previously stated it should not be a crime to enter the U.S. illegally?
- How can voters trust you on the economy when even liberal Washington Post columnists are attacking your price control plan?
- Did you really work at McDonald’s? You never mentioned it until you decided to run for president?
Christy concluded by laughably insisting his ridiculously biased questions were about “substance”: “Bash has an opportunity to force Harris and Walz to focus on substance. Asking the questions on this list will be a good test of CNN’s desire to make the election about issues rather than personalities.”
When the interview itself went well, it was sour-grapes time. Jorge Bonilla groused:
The American people were promised, by CNN, an interview of Vice President Kamala Harris — the first since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee. But the public received no such interview, hype notwithstanding. Instead, voters were treated to a melánge of talking-point set pieces, the kind one normally sees at a debate. In essence, this was little more than a debate dress rehearsal.
Such is the coddling given by the media to Harris that a routine post-rollout interview is hyped as “a watershed moment” by Regime propagandist Dana Bash. We were all forewarned.
Bonilla similarly served up a partisan dumping on Walz:
Shortly thereafter, Walz gets asked about his misrepresentations of his military service. In listening to Walz’s response blaming bad grammar for his assertion that he carried “weapons of war” while “in war”, one is reminded of Celia Cruz and her classic “my English is not very good looking”. Walz never does provide a response on stolen valor, pivoting instead to abortion:
[…]Moving on to the portion of the program addressing Joe Biden, Harris expresses no regret of defending Biden’s ability to serve. Bash’s followup on incumbency enables another set piece you can expect to see at the debate- Harris throwing off her incumbency and positioning herself as a challenger running against the Trump Era:
Bonilla ultimately whined:
Harris-Walz emerge from this debate rehearsal unscathed, unburdened from the prospect of having to face persistent follow-up questions and never having to worry about getting cut off mid-answer or getting “fact-checked in real time”, as is often the case with Republicans sitting down with Regime Media.
To call this an interview is an egregious insult to interviews everywhere. The Regime should be pleased, given that its new figurehead emerged largely unscathed. But voters are probably coming away from this with more questions than answers.
Bonilla has obviously never watched an “interview” of Trump by anyone on Fox News, Newsmax or any other right-wing channel — or maybe he has, which is why Bonilla’s MRC co-workers only appear on those channels because they know they will get the same softballs Trump does.
Christy returned to grumble that Bash didn’t sufficiently bow to his biased questioning demands:
Prior to CNN’s Thursday interview with the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, we suggested 30 questions that Dana Bash might ask the duo in their much-hyped first interview. But when it came time to sit down to talk in Savannah, Bash only asked five of them.
Bash did manage to ask Harris about her fracking flip-flop, “Do you still want to ban fracking?… In 2019, I believe in a town hall, you said — you were asked, would you commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking on your first day in office? And you said: There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. So, yes. So, it changed in the — in that campaign?”
[…]The president’s most important role is that of commander-in-chief and keeping the country safe. The words “China,” “Russia,” and “Iran” did not appear once. The only foreign policy question was from the left: “Would you withhold some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel? That’s what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.”
On the economy, Bash declined to press Harris on her radical price control plan or how she could address the debt while not cutting spending or if she and Biden overspent, causing inflation.
Likewise, when Walz hyped the ticket’s stance on abortion, Bash refused to question him on his radical record as governor of Minnesota and Harris on if she supports any limits. Nor did she ask about Title IX and the issue of transgender individuals competing in women’s sports.
Bash further declined to press Harris on what she would do when Democratic interest groups collide with each other. She did not mention union concerns about electric vehicles. While she mentioned far-left concerns about Gaza, she did not mention potential Title VI violations during anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses.
She did not ask Harris if she still thinks America is a systemically racist country or favors Supreme Court expansion.
Christy further whined that ” CNN asks Walz’s GOP counterpart, JD Vance, if he was making light of suicide by posting a nearly 20-year-old video clip of a Miss Teen USA beauty pageant.” As Christy’s writeup of that interview makes clear, Vance refused to apologize for his sick joke — which, of course, Christy gave Vance a pass on, only grudgingly admitting that the pageant contestant “had to put up with a lot of garbage for one embarrassing moment that, unfortunately, happened to occur in front of the whole world,” then baselessly claimed that she “agrees with Vance, as she was able to laugh through an Access Hollywood interview in 2021 about the incident.” Christy didn’t explain how the contestant could agree with Vance three years before he tweeted his smear.