During Kamala Harris’s thrilling ride that has upended the 2024 presidential campaign, journalists have largely been on the outside looking in. The vice president has not given an interview and has had little contact with reporters since becoming the Democratic choice to replace Joe. Biden.
That’s going to change now that it has become a campaign issue. But for journalists, the bigger lesson is that their role as presidential gatekeepers will likely be forever diminished.
Harris travels with reporters from Air Force Two and talks to them regularly, but her campaign staff insists the conversations are off the record. Outside the plane Thursday, she approached cameras and notebooks to publicly answer some questions, one of which was about when she would sit down for an in-depth interview.
“I talked to my team,” she said. “I want us to have a job interview together by the end of the month.”
She spoke on the same afternoon that her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, gave a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort, partly to create a contrast with Harris. “She’s not smart enough to hold a press conference,” Trump said. His vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, posted a comment on social media pointing out that Trump did something Harris had not done.
Given that modern presidential campaigns are essentially marketing operations, Harris’ position is not surprising. For the teams behind the candidates, “the goal is to control the message as much as possible,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican communications strategist who was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012.
Interviews and press conferences take away that control. Candidates are at the mercy of the questions journalists ask – even if they try to change the subject. News outlets decide which answers are newsworthy and will be broken down into sound bites that blast around social networks, often stripped of the context in which they were uttered.
In such an environment, the value and perception of the sit-down interview has changed – for journalists and candidates alike.
When Trump appeared in an interview format for the National Association of Black Journalists last month, his aides almost certainly didn’t want the main headline to be about their candidate, suggesting Harris had misled voters about her race.
Besides Instagram, Tik-Tok, television meetings, emails or text messages, campaigns today have so many other ways to get their message across to potential voters. This reduces the need to contact journalists directly, Madden said.
“Presidential campaigns are increasingly conducted as performances before a sympathetic audience, an audience invited to watch and listen, but not to ask questions or respond,” The New York Times wrote in a recent editorial.
Harris’ unusually late entry into the race means she bypassed vetting by voters, with journalists often as their surrogates, who play a more important role in the early stages of a nomination battle, where a more intimate form of retail politics varies from state to state. . That makes it all the more important that she is available to speak about her record and plans, the newspaper argued.
“Americans deserve the opportunity to ask questions of those who want to lead their government,” the editorial said.
The Times editorial staff requested an interview with Harris and did not receive a response, a spokesperson said. The same was true for Biden before he dropped out.
Harris and her team may be taught by her boss; Biden has lagged behind previous presidents in the number of interviews granted and press conferences held. That changed after the June debate with Trump, which sent his re-election bid into a death spiral; Television interviews with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and NBC’s Lester Holt did little to change that trajectory.
Trump has been more available, but he often talks to people who are unlikely to challenge him. Since July 5, he has been giving interviews to Fox News personalities Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Harris Faulkner, Brian Kilmeade and Sean Hannity. He has also appeared twice on the ‘Fox’ & Friends’ morning show.
Between those interviews — often cut and broadcast on other networks — and an endless stream of posts on his Truth Social site, Trump is “a content machine,” Madden said.
Trump’s press conference was broadcast live on CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, although CNN and MSNBC both dropped out before finishing verifying some claims.
Fox has also often highlighted the problem of Harris’ lack of access. “Trump answers questions while Harris avoids media,” said one of the messages on the network’s screen as Trump spoke.
“We can’t be the only media company talking about it,” Fox’s Bill Hemmer said Tuesday, referring to the upcoming Democratic national convention. ‘She didn’t have a significant interview for sixteen days. Is it possible she can run out the clock until Chicago? That would be extraordinary. then you should ask yourself. What are you hiding? What is your team hiding from?”
Madden said that while interviews are less important than they used to be, there are still some undecided voters who want to see them to help them make their choices. That’s why he expects this to happen.
“You want to keep it under control as long as possible,” he said. “They’ve had so much momentum in the last few weeks that they haven’t really had to sit down and make their case directly to the reporters yet. The day will surely come.”
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Associated Press reporters Seung Min Kim and Will Weissert in Washington and Darlene Superville in Romulus, Michigan, contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him up http://twitter.com/dbauder.
