Establishment media organizations timidly began to report this week on Vice President Kamala Harris’s lack of unscripted interviews since she became her party’s de facto nominee.
The rarity of the tepid reporting spotlights the media’s failure to secure an interview with Harris. Media outlets typically rush to interview newly nominated presidential candidates, but Kamala Harris appears to be an exception to the rule.
The media has not interviewed Harris on television since June 24, 2024. The last time the press reportedly questioned Harris at a solo news conference was eight months ago on December 2, 2023. Only a few reports in the past few days recount Harris’s lack of unscripted interviews, much less any headlines that slammed Harris for failing to sit for a primetime interview after receiving the nomination.
“The Harris camp is hoping to ride the wave as long as it can,” Politico’s West Wing Playbook explained, appearing to defend Harris’s lack of media access. “So there is little worry about the candidate avoiding something else that has long been required of presidential nominees: taking questions from the press.”
Harris promised on Thursday to schedule only one interview in August, and it remains unclear if the interview will take place in the last three weeks of August or if the interview’s scheduling will take place before August ends.
Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz wave as they board Air Force Two at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport on Aug. 7, 2024, in Eau Claire, WI. (AP Photo/Julia Nikhinson)
“There are dangers to taking tough questions,” argued the Hill’s Amie Parnes. “Since becoming the likely Democratic nominee following Biden’s departure from the race, Harris has narrowed the gap with Trump in polls and has even taken the lead in some surveys.”
“Where is it written that you have to sit down for a press interview?” asked James Carville, a Democrat political pundit. “They’ve had to pick a vice president, plan a convention, move around, do this, do that, and she’s already agreed to a debate.”
Perhaps the most glaring aspect of the media’s apparent lack of urgency to interview Harris is that it comes at the expense of monetizing relevant content. Elite media organizations are financially struggling in the new age of digital media. They count on newsworthy stories generated by relevant people and events to publish content for monetization.Without enough monetization, media organizations drop like flies. Many already have, as others struggle to stay solvent. Industry layoffs appear to be a rule of thumb. Just this week, Axios, “a far-left propaganda site,” according to Breitbart News’s John Nolte, announced a ten percent cut of its 500-person staff during the busy presidential election cycle.
The journalism industry employed a half-million people about 25 years ago. “Now, more than two-thirds of newspaper journalist jobs have vanished since 2005, and it is widely accepted that the trend will continue in the coming decades,” Politico’s Jack Shafer whined in May.
With the media in retreat, Harris remains content to avoid them as long as she can, a longtime Harris ally told West Wing. Harris could run the basement strategy until at least Labor Day, the ally suggested.
Harris appears to have at least two reasons to avoid unscripted interviews for as long as she can. First, she has a habit of delivering silly word salads. Harris is infamous for spouting odd phrases and explanations for simple ideas. In 2022, for example, she marveled over Venn diagrams. “More alphabet soup from Kamala,” one X user mocked. Another time Harris rambled about the “significance of the passage of time.”
Second, Harris appears to be trying to navigate policy debates within her own party. Anonymous campaign aides reportedly flipped-flopped on five of her radical-left policies, such as fracking, a key policy very important to voters in Pennsylvania. More is here on Harris’s radical record.
“What can be. Unburdened by what has been,” as Harris often says:
Kamala Harris is “unburdened by what has been.”
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 13, 2023
She is also “unburdened” by competency.pic.twitter.com/3XKC7hJXW5
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.
