The Media Research Center spent the presidential campaign obsessively nitpicking pretty much every interview Kamala Harris did, cherry-picking moments to loudly declare each one a miserable failure. Nicholas Fondacaro served up a hostile preview of Harris’ appearance on “The View’ in an Oct. 7 post:
With Vice President Kamala Harris set to appear on ABC’s The View on Tuesday, the liberal ladies spent part of their Monday show praising her for only making media appearances with friendly shows and outlets like theirs. Fake Republican and ABC News co-host, Ana Navarro lashed out at Harris’s critics who said she need to actually answer tough questions, shrieking: “What more do you all want?!”
“You know, there’s been a lot of moaning and groaning for weeks now that Kamala Harris hasn’t been doing interviews, isn’t doing interviews,” Navarro huffed.
She then proceeded to list off some of the media appearances Harris had done and had coming up, seemingly ignorant of the fact that many of the hosts were either openly liberal, leaned to the left, openly anti-Trump, or had publically [sic] endorsed her at some point:
[…]It’s no surprise Harris chose to appear alongside the ladies of The View. As a recent NewsBusters study found, the week following the second assassination attempt on former President Trump, The View was 100 percent negative against Trump and 100 percent positive for Harris.
Fondacaro predictably tore apart the interview the next day:
One of the major risks with a politician avoiding media appearances is that they can get so out of practice that even a simple question can trip them up. Couple that with a friendly media personality looking to help out their candidate with softball questions, and you have a recipe for what happened on Tuesday’s edition of The View; where ABC News co-host Sunny Hostin may have accidently damaged Vice President Kamala Harris by creating a soundbite moment ripe for a Trump campaign ad.
The interview was a gushfest from the beginning. ABC News moderator Whoopi Goldberg actually introduced Harris as “the next president of the United States!”
[…]A simple follow up question from Hostin triggered a train wreck of a response that had the potential to really damage Harris’s campaign once it made it into campaign ads:
HOSTIN: If anything, would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?
HARRIS: There is not a thing that comes to mind… and I’ve been part of most of the decisions that have had impact.
What made this particularly damning was that polls showed a majority of American said the country was on the wrong track and that the economy was their biggest issue. That’s not to mention that Trump was winning on the issue so the economy and illegal immigration.
Fondacaro wants us to think his analysis is beyond partisanship. It’s not.
Curtis Houck devoted an Oct. 8 post to whining about Harris’ interview with Howard Stern, which he described in his headline as “Absolute Torture”:
After Vice President Kamala Harris fumbled away friendly interviews with the likes of Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy, CBS’s 60 Minutes, and ABC’s The View in the past week, Harris went on SiriusXM for perhaps the friendliest and most Notable Quotable-worth interview she’ll ever face with former shock jock, Howard Stern.
For someone who made his living on indecency (and having certain guests ride a sex toy on his show), the apocalyptic germaphobe brought in Harris for a 75-minute sit-down which felt much more like a Stern monologue.
NewsBusters sifted through all 75 minutes for the worst moments, which include Stern declared she shouldn’t be “made fun of” because “there’s too much at stake,” claimed Trump supporters keep him “up at night,” doesn’t “understand how this election is close,” said the Supreme Court allows Donald Trump to assassinate her, told her to leave the country if Trump wins, predicted “the darkest skies on the planet” if Trump triumphs, and gushed over her (false) claim about working at McDonald’s.
Fortunately, it was bizarre from the start as, after the two discussed their shared love of Prince, Stern fawned over her proclamation that she doesn’t “like talking about” herself considering “the other guy is so only talking about himself.”
Stern added that what Harris has “taken on is extraordinarily difficult” and thus he’s “really nervous because I want this to go well for you” and “the country.”
Houck followed this with 13 cherry-picked clips from the interview designed to reinforce his attack. He huffed that “The interview closed as it began with fluff as Harris shared how The View went, detailing her visit to see U2 at The Sphere in Las Vegas, and her Formula 1 fandom.” (Also, Houck provided no actual proof that Harris’ claim of having worked at McDonald’s is “false.”)
The point of all this was to frame Harris as a lightweight who can’t handle a challenging interview — which would be disproved by her interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier, whether the MRC wants to admit it or not — and Tim Graham reinforced that narrative in his Oct. 9 column. Interestingly, he started off bashing an interview his minions failed to examine at all, smearing the show as a favorite of “aspiring Bill Clinton interns”:
For more than two months, Republicans have mocked Kamala Harris for hiding in the basement and not granting interviews and press conferences, which could give people an idea of how she might handle the presidency. So after she and Tim Walz have engaged in debates, Team Harris decided to book her on a series of softball interviews.
Start with the “Call Her Daddy” sex podcast, which sounds like something that would be easy for conservatives to mock. Sure, it is a massively popular podcast among young women, but it sounds like more of a forum for aspiring Bill Clinton interns than a public policy platform. Naturally, Barbie-lookalike podcaster Alex Cooper is “sex-positive,” which also means “abortion-positive.”
Cooper wasn’t going to ask about Kamala being “mentored” in her career by powerful San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown when she was his young paramour. She wasn’t going to ask about her husband Doug Emhoff ruining his first marriage by cheating with the nanny and getting her pregnant.
This from the organization that freaked out over the details of Trump paying hush money to a porn star being reported. He moved on to whining about Stern and “The View”:
These are also the kind of saucy subjects that the old Howard Stern would want to talk about on the radio. But the new Howard Stern is firmly entrenched on the left, and he was suggesting to Harris that she was in danger if Donald Trump was re-elected. “If he wins, God forbid, would you feel safe in this country? Would you stay in this country?”
Remember that old song “Paranoia Will Destroy Ya”? Howard Stern jumped the shark and landed in a crib.
Then there were the liberal ladies of The View on ABC. Fox News people joked that would turn out to be more of a “hot stone massage” than an interview. Whoopi Goldberg set the tone by introducing Harris as “the next president of the United States!”
There were moments the news people could underline. Sunny Hostin asked, “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?” Harris replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” So much for all her talk of “turning the page.”
Graham’s case of Clinton Derangement Syndrome continued: “The toughest appearance on the list was 60 Minutes on CBS, but based on the record, that’s not saying much. Bill Clinton tiptoed around Gennifer Flowers on that show.” Graham does know that Clinton hasn’t been president for more than two decades, doesn’t he?
(Also, “Paranoia Will Destroy Ya” is not the title of that song — it’s a lyric in “Destroyer” by the Kinks. Graham really needs to engage in better quality research because the MRC’s reputation in the realm of “media research” is shaky enough as it is.)
UPDATE: Christian Toto also lashed out at the Stern-Harris interview in his Oct. 12 column:
Stern interviewed Vice President Kamala Harris this week, part of her attempt to find the softest softball interviewers around. And Stern came to the top of the list along with “The View” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
His Harris chat, a little over an hour, let the presidential candidate speak without fact checks or challenging questions.
We expected that.
It’s why her campaign chose Stern. He’s a Useful Idiot of sorts much like his pal, Jimmy Kimmel.
We thought the MRC hated fact-checks.