bitch | Media is having a meltdown because Kamala Harris is not giving interviews

The media has been at a loss for what to do for the past three weeks. Ever since Joe Biden outwitted his own party and incorporated his support for Kamala Harris into his withdrawal announcement, it’s been a positive dynamic for the Harris campaign, and now the Harris-Walz campaign. The campaign is fundraising like crazy, Harris’ choice of Walz as her running mate has been embraced across the Democratic spectrum, and all of Harris’ campaign stops and rallies are drawing huge crowds. Enthusiasm is running high, the campaign has recruited thousands of volunteers, and, perhaps best of all, it has completely unsettled Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. But the media needs a conflict, they need something to hold over Kamala Harris’ head. They’ve struck a deal. “Why isn’t Vice President Harris giving interviews?!?” Excerpt from Politico:

By featuring Tim Walz, the campaign received millions of dollars in free media: The cheering crowd at the Philadelphia arena was captivated. Cable networks also carried the event live and uninterrupted for about 80 minutes, beginning with another powerful and closely watched speech by Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Harris’s running mate. The free publicity — or “earned media,” as operatives call it — is worth millions, and it’s reminiscent of how cable networks aired countless hours of then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign rallies in 2016.

Trump is no longer entitled to this kind of free media: Eight years later, things have changed. Trump, now in his third campaign for the White House, continues to deliver on his promises at rallies that are only sporadically broadcast live on television networks (the YouTube channel “Right Side Broadcasting” doesn’t count). Now Harris is the new star of the race, her rallies giving the left-leaning network MSNBC some of its best ratings in weeks. Preliminary figures show that Tuesday’s rally brought the network more than double its average audience for the past four weeks between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Kamala is not doing interviews at the moment: Harris’s camp is hoping to ride the wave for as long as possible. So there’s no need to worry that the candidate will avoid something else that has long been required of presidential candidates: taking questions from the press. While some reporters and columnists have begun to grumble about it, JD Vance, Trump’s running mate who is set to face Harris and Walz on the road this week, tried Wednesday to draw more attention to the issue.

His last interview, in June, defended President Biden: On June 27, she appeared on CNN and sat down with host ANDERSON COOPER less than an hour after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, acknowledging that “it was a slow start” but confidently suggesting that the country should evaluate his performance as president over three and a half years, not “90 minutes on a debate stage.” Harris’s determined on-air defense of Biden three years later—which she crafted independently of the campaign—offered a template that Biden and others would use to try to stem the political bleeding. While Biden’s closest aides also viewed the interview as a genuine show of loyalty, some in Harris’ inner circle saw her confident, forceful responses to Cooper as evidence of how far she had come.

Skepticism: Since Biden handed over to Harris, the media has been pressuring the vice president’s team to schedule an interview. Discussions are underway about a joint interview between Harris and Walz ahead of the convention, which begins Aug. 19 in Chicago, according to two people familiar with the campaign’s thinking. But overall, Harris’ top communications advisers are deeply skeptical, as was Biden’s inner circle, that major interviews with major networks or national newspapers offer any real advantage in reaching swing voters. One longtime Harris ally suggested to West Wing Playbook that Harris might wait until after Labor Day to do major interviews. “There’s really no need,” the person said. “The voters she needs are at the local level. They don’t read the national press.”

(Excerpt from Politico)

There’s more on Politico — even the idea that Harris relies on a teleprompter, because women are morons, I don’t get it — but the general thrust is there. Kamala’s inner circle doesn’t see any upside, and I don’t blame them. She’s always been treated exceptionally cruelly by the mainstream political press, and she just saw what those same people did to Joe Biden. I’d say “fuck them forever and die crazy,” but I know she won’t. She and Tim Walz will probably do an interview together before the convention, and she’ll do a few TV interviews in the fall. But just to be clear … this is a media-created controversy, and the longer Harris waits to “give an interview,” the ruder and more obnoxious these people will be.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.