Establishment media reporters appear to be coaching the Harris campaign on who should receive the first interview with Vice President Kamala Harris since joining the presidential race, according to Politico Playbook.
The collusion underscores Harris’s partnership with media allies who are supposed to ask the tough questions and hold candidates accountable.
WATCH — Harris Senior Adviser Bottoms: Voters Do Not Care “Whether or Not” Kamala Does an Interview:
The media, however, appear to be in league with Harris’s candidacy. Television networks provided Harris with 84 percent “positive coverage” since she joined the presidential race, a Media Research Center study found last week, while they produced 89 percent negative coverage of former President Donald Trump.
The media have not interviewed Harris on television since June 24, and the last time the press reportedly questioned her at a solo news conference was eight months ago, on December 2, 2023. Harris has not held an unscripted press conference or unscripted sit-down interview about policy solutions for 37 days since joining the presidential race.
Harris will purportedly sit for an interview this week as part of her campaign’s ramped-up strategy heading into the post-Labor Day push, Axios reported Monday, but questions remain about who she will select to host the interview. “Harris campaign staff have been asking reporters who they think she should talk to,” Playbook reported Tuesday, with “race and gender” as key criteria in Harris’s selection of a host.
WATCH — Dem Strategist Roginsky: Harris Not Doing Interviews “Unforced Error,” She Should Do Local Press:
As Harris continues to campaign without much pressure to hold an unscripted interview, there appears to be infighting within the campaign about the purpose of Harris’s first interview. Harris believes that a potential interview should be short, not “big” and “showy,” or “with a brand-name news anchor who will push her on issues,” according to Playbook.
Ashley Etienne, Harris’s former communications adviser, believes the interview should distance herself from President Joe Biden on select issues. “She should substantively draw some distinctions with Biden on some policy issues,” she told Playbook.
Harris has had it both ways on the campaign trail: simultaneously taking credit for some of the Biden-Harris administration’s record while casting Trump as the incumbent. The contradiction wrongly frames Trump as the candidate responsible for soaring migrant crime, spiking inflation, and the deadly Afghan withdrawal, three situations that arose under the Biden-Harris administration.
The contradiction stems from the media’s failure to ignore a “catch-22″ rooted within Harris’s candidacy: Harris cannot campaign on policies to fix crime, inflation, and border security without undermining the Biden-Harris administration’s claim of solving those key issues. However, Harris must tout the administration’s policy successes to validate her record and candidacy.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.