Media to Kamala Harris: You're Doing It Wrong

Beware big-shot reporters who aren't shown the deference they think they deserve.

Not Kamala Harris, but you get the idea. (Photo by Olivia Chow)

By some measures, Kamala Harris has gotten very favorable media coverage since she became a candidate. This is not due to reporters’ affection for her; rather, it’s that almost all the news about her has been good, from the way she locked up support in the Democratic Party to her successful convention to her spanking of Donald Trump in their debate. While Republicans have surely been working hard to uncover scandals in her past or present, they have clearly come up empty. If journalists are looking for stories they could tell to knock her down a peg, they haven’t had much to work with. 

And yet, many of them are dissatisfied with the way she is running her campaign. In particular, they’re unhappy with how she is treating them, namely that she isn’t doing a lot of interviews with big-time news organizations. Other than one sit-down she and Tim Walz did with CNN, her campaign has treated the elite media as though they have no particular claim on her time; she has done more local radio and TV interviews than national ones. 

You can read many complaints about Harris’s lack of media accessibility (see here or here or here or here), though reporters seem unconcerned about the fact that Donald Trump does no interviews with them either. He talks to Fox News, other right-wing outlets, and dudebro podcasts, but he does not sit down with major newspapers or television networks, and somehow they don’t seem to mind. But as always, Democrats are held to a higher standard, scolded for failing to uphold the most elevated democratic norms while Republicans’ violation of those norms is taken for granted. 

To be clear, all politicians should answer questions as often as possible, though I’d have more sympathy for the demand that Harris sit for interviews if they were less focused on gotchas (Why did you flip-flop?) and horse-race talk (Why aren’t you doing better among men aged 18-29 in Pennsylvania?) and more concerned with actual substance. And yes, Harris tends to be very cautious and careful in interviews, which makes them less than enlightening. 

But what really galls reporters, I believe, is that Harris has declined to approach them as a supplicant. They expect (and receive) contempt from Trump and Republicans, but from Democrats they want respect, admiration, and acknowledgment of their vital role in the operation of the democratic system. To be clear, we in the media do have a vital role in the operation of democracy; of course we do. But elite reporters want Harris to say it, and show some deference to them, especially to the reporters and news organizations at the top of the media pyramid.

Yet she hasn’t, and that’s what galls them. She is not begging for their approval. She glides past them toward a stage or her plane or a group of voters, not worried about whether they like her.

Friendly advice from the spurned

Let’s take a look at one New York Times column that I think reflects the prevailing sentiment. Written by Todd Purdum, who was a longtime Times political reporter and then moved on to positions at The Atlantic and Vanity Fair, it’s presented as friendly advice, explaining to Harris why she should want to give reporters the face time they crave. Purdum starts by saying it took too long for Harris to get to the meaty policy details in an answer she gave about the economy in an interview with a Philadelphia TV station. She needs to offer more “direct, succinct answers and explanations,” he writes, because “Being known as a straight shooter would also help persuade restive political elites, pundits and journalists that Ms. Harris is grappling with such scrutiny, and I think she’s apt to be rewarded in the end for it.”

This is unintentionally revealing. Purdum has little to say about whether Harris’ ideas are good ones; what he’s advising is that she put on a better show. She doesn’t have to be a straight shooter, she just has to appear to be a straight shooter, and then she’ll be rewarded not just by the voters but by the elites who pretend to care about substance, but actually don’t.

Purdum goes on to say that “over the years, I have gleaned an appreciation for what works in campaigns and what doesn’t,” and he has the answer for Harris: Be seen answering questions! Not because voters will understand her better, but because they will see her answering questions, and decide she is the question-answering type. He gives some examples, including one in which Bill Clinton “may well have won the 1992 election in that memorable moment in his town hall debate with George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot when he understood that a voter’s confusing question about the deficit was really about economic dislocation — and began his answer to the question by asking her to elaborate on her concerns.”

That was indeed an important moment in 1992, but it was really about Clinton’s superior skill as a performer, not the genuine differences between him and Bush. What Purdum doesn’t mention is that that moment was replayed over and over in subsequent media coverage because it illustrated what reporters had already concluded, that Bush was out of touch and Clinton was a master at communicating his care for people. And reporters will always reward the candidate who is a better performer. 

Heed us, or else

Purdum offers this story and a couple others to explain why Harris needs to change the way she’s campaigning, essentially to make her campaign more amenable to reporters’ desire for both access and the supposedly decisive moments around which they can build their coverage. But if she follows Purdum’s advice, reporters will only reward her for it if they judge her to be a compelling performer and if they feel she has been properly deferential to them, which I suspect she and her campaign understand. 

There is a real danger here, however, that at some point the elite news media will get really perturbed, then bide their time until they can grab on to some story, now matter how absurd, and use it to punish Harris for whatever sins they feel she has committed. We’ve seen it before.

That’s what’s worrisome: When reporters’ resentments build, eventually they’ll burst forth, and then be used to deflect responsibility for the news media’s own questionable choices. This came up in a post this week by Judd Legum at Popular Information about the media’s decision not to publish internal Trump campaign documents likely hacked by the Iranian government. According to Legum, in the waning days of the 2016 campaign, the New York Times published an incredible 199 articles mining Democratic emails — stolen by the Russian government and passed to Wikileaks — for juicy tidbits. But that obsessive coverage, the Times said in an editorial published that October, was actually Hillary Clinton’s fault. “Imagine if months ago, Mrs. Clinton had done her own giant information release,” they wrote. “Journalists and the public could have waded through them, discussed them, written about them — and by now, everyone would have long since moved on.” 

Which of course they wouldn’t have; the press had long before decided that Clinton was corrupt, and they were going to paint her that way no matter what (you may have noticed that reporters’ passion for policing proper email practices was decidedly muted when it was Trump administration officials using private emails for government work). 

We see some variant of that excuse again and again, questionable or even appalling news judgments rationalized with “This would have gone better for you if you had given us what we wanted,” an assertion that is not only implausible but echoes the abuser’s victim-blaming. Look what you made us do. You brought this on yourself.

Something like that may or may not happen to Kamala Harris in the next six weeks before the election. But if it does, we may be able to trace the seeds of the fake scandal (whatever it is) to this moment of grumbling.

Other stuff I wrote and said this week

• In Democracy, I reviewed Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics by Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins.

• At MSNBC, I looked at the fact that Harris has caught up to Trump on the economy, and why it doesn’t tell us that the public has figured out who’d actually be better for them.

• At Heatmap, I wrote about what would happen to the Inflation Reduction Act in a Republican Congress. It might be better than you think.

• And there’s a new episode of Boundary Issues, in which Ayelet and I talk to Michael Podhorzer, former political director of the AFL-CIO and poll guru, about what the polls do and don’t say, and why you shouldn’t overreact to every one that comes out. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!