There Is a Trump Double Standard, But Kamala Harris Still Owes It to Americans To Speak to the Press
The media rightly wants the Democratic nominee to grant an in-depth interview or hold a wide-open news conference, even as the Republican candidate rants and raves at them.
I value the interviews I’ve had with all our recent presidents: George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and, last fall, Joe Biden. I hope to interview Kamala Harris myself.
So do the political journalists who have converged in Chicago to cover Harris’ nominating convention. At the same time, Democrats want the journalists to hector her Republican opponent, Trump, the way they have hectored President Biden.
Neither one, to borrow from Mick Jagger, will get no satisfaction.
Since becoming the Democratic candidate, Harris hasn’t granted an in-depth interview or held a wide-open news conference. She should. Probing conversations help voters with their choices.
Even the loudest critics of political journalism’s flaws – inordinate focus on polls, process, and trivia – acknowledge the importance of candidates taking their questions.
“I don’t have a lot of confidence that the broken White House press corps would skillfully elicit the answers to…germane questions if given the chance,” Margaret Sullivan, who has chronicled press foibles for the Washington Post and New York Times, wrote in The Guardian. “But Harris should show that she understands that in a democracy, the press – at least in theory – represents the public.”
I have no doubt Harris will do that when her campaign decides the time is right. But the amount of access will never be enough for reporters because she’s trying to win the election.
So far, she’s had a little more than four weeks to take center stage, select a running mate, and plan her convention. After the DNC concludes this week, 73 days will remain before Election Day.
She has surged into the lead over Trump. Sustaining momentum requires a relentless focus on contrasts she wants to draw: old vs. new, past vs. future, rich vs. middle-class, fear vs. hope. It does not require explaining her shifts on issues since 2020, her interactions with Biden before he quit the race, or her early attempts as vice president to stem illegal border crossings.
Her answers would make headlines for a media outlet and gratify the ego of the reporter involved. But they probably wouldn’t help her beat Trump. That’s why Republicans demand she take questions as loudly as journalists do.
In reality, after her eight years as senator and vice president, there’s little mystery about the broad outlines of her positions on taxes, spending, health care, abortion, climate change, guns, and voting rights. Details matter little until the next Congress takes shape and shows what’s possible.
What matters more to her prospects – and has driven Trump crazy – are the images of cheering throngs at her campaign rallies.
Democrats hardly feel inclined to make nice with reporters anyway.
They’ve given Biden mostly bad press since his inauguration, touting negative developments on inflation, illegal immigration, and crime without comparable emphasis on improvements now that trendlines have turned positive. The burdens of his age draw more attention than the benefits of his accomplishments.
That’s negativity bias, the most powerful source of distortion in journalism. Biden doesn’t hide his annoyance, as when one reporter asked about signs that inflation has been tamed.
“I told you we’re going to have a soft landing,” the president answered. “My policies are working. Start writing it that way, OK?”
From “Eastern Liberal Press” to “MSM” to “Fake News”
Republicans have fulminated for decades of the media’s liberal bias.
In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon, Vice President Spiro Agnew, and their allies complained that the “Eastern Liberal Press” – what their political descendants now call Mainstream Media or Fake News – assailed them unfairly. The Washington Post made my father its first ombudsman, in part to evaluate and respond to their complaints.
The Republicans have a point. Many – if not most – journalists in the US, like most Democrats, hold left-of-center views.
But over the course of my career, other factors have increasingly offset that bias. GOP officials have aggressively and effectively “worked the refs,” goading reporters to eye Democrats more critically as a matter of fairness.
Shrinking audiences and revenue streams at mainstream news have magnified their incentives to court Republican viewers and listeners. Trump draws bigger box office numbers than any other politician.
Following Biden’s withdrawal from the race, Trump became the oldest presidential nominee in American history. He rants nonsensically and nurtures bizarre obsessions. But he hasn’t faced anything like the fitness-for-office feeding frenzy that knocked the Democratic incumbent out after his doddering debate performance. Nor has the media published hacked Trump campaign emails they’ve received from foreign sources, as they did with Hillary Clinton’s campaign under similar circumstances in 2016; this time, news executives say, they are more wary of doing the bidding of the hackers.
For one thing, reporters know that questioning Trump’s continued viability in the race leads nowhere. Sharing his grievances, Republican voters disdain mainstream reporting at odds with the alternative reality of the right-wing information bubble. That gives him shoot-somebody-in-the-middle-of-Fifth-Avenue immunity.
Besides, Trump’s dishonesty and criminality are so pervasive as to blur the specifics. National Public Radio counted 162 lies at one recent Trump “news conference.” No journalist even asked about a new Washington Post blockbuster disclosing a federal investigation into the possibility that Egypt had given him $ 10 million in cash.
“Trump benefits from a double standard,” writes Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine, because “his violations of democratic and civic norms are so widespread that the media have given up on holding him to anything resembling a customary standard of behavior for a presidential candidate.”
The media hasn’t given up on holding his opponent to customary standards of behavior. The salve for Harris and her party at the moment is that she’s winning.
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ZETEO TOWN HALL AFTER KAMALA HARRIS' DNC SPEECH
On Thursday, Mehdi and Zeteo political reporter Prem Thakker will host a live Town Hall Q&A for paid subscribers, debriefing Harris’ speech, highlighting the most important moments of the convention, and answering your questions about what comes next. Be on the lookout for that registration on Thursday afternoon!
Your article reflects your interest and currently Harris's focus is to win in November.
If you do get a chance to ask a question of her would you ask her if she would follow all US laws judicially? Such as the 1997 Leahy law forbidding US to ship/sell/provide arms to nations or units involved in Gross Human Rights violations?
Does dropping a 2000# bomb classify as Gross Human Rights Violation under Leahy Laws definition?
No. She doesn't "owe it to American's to speak to the press" if that includes the billionaire-owned "corporate/mainstream" media. She owes it to Americans to speak to Americans. She should do that as directly as possible without the distortions, burying of the lede, and mis-casting that are pretty much guaranteed to infect any so-called "reporting" by entities such as the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post, not to mention non-news entertainment liars like Fox News. Instead, she should go direct whenever possible and where actual honest journalists can be found, spend some time talking to them as well. I subscribe to NYT and WaPo, but it's not because I trust the fairness and accuracy of their reporting. It's because, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."