The Beltway press is angry that Vice President Kamala Harris hasn’t sat down with them to talk about things like policy. In their warped, archaic minds, they are important to the political process as a way to inform readers about the candidates.
That was a thing before social media and the internet, for sure. But today? The Beltway media is broken beyond repair, and we’re all doing fine learning about Harris on our own, thank you very much.
Margaret Sullivan, a columnist for The Guardian, echoed much of the press with her haughtily titled column “Kamala Harris must speak to the press,” published Tuesday. As Sullivan admits up front, Harris is riding high bypassing the traditional press, rising in the polls, and dominating media coverage.
“From a tactical or strategic point of view, there’s little reason” for Harris to give a sit-down interview or hold a press conference, Sullivan wrote.
She also admits the core reality of today’s Beltway media: “What’s more, when the vice-president has interacted with reporters in recent weeks, as in a brief ‘gaggle’ during a campaign stop, the questions were silly. Seeking campaign drama rather than substance, they centered on Donald Trump’s attacks or when she was planning to do a press conference.”
That should’ve been the end of the column. Harris doesn’t need the press, and when she does talk to them, they squander their opportunity on inanities. The end!
But no, Sullivan argues that Harris “owes it to every U.S. citizen to be frank and forthcoming about what kind of president she intends to be. To tell us—in an unscripted, open way—what she stands for. We don’t know much about that, other than vague campaign platitudes about ‘freedom’ and ‘not going back.’”
Sullivan is clearly confused, but I doubt that many of her readers are.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, don’t randomly throw out the word “freedom” and call it a day. They always explain it in the context of bodily autonomy, whether it’s about abortion rights, LGTBQ+ rights, or the ability to read a book without censors pitching it into a bonfire.
This recent speech by Walz might help Sullivan out:
Similarly, Harris and Walz use their unofficial slogan “We’re not going back” in context of Donald Trump’s disastrous four years as president. Has Sullivan forgotten those years already? Does she really not realize that “We’re not going back” is a counter to the explicitly regressive, backward-looking worldview contained in Trump’s “Make America Great Again”?
Either way, voters are very much liking what the Harris-Walz ticket is saying.
Regardless, Sullivan pushes forward in her column:
Do these questions matter? Sure. Do we need to know them to make a decision for president? Not now. Will they need to be addressed at some point? Sure, but it’s not like she needs a sit-down interview to do it. Will voters cast their ballot based on who the head of the Federal Trade Commission is? Doubtful.
Jeff Jarvis, a journalist and professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, reacted to that column with scorn, tweeting, “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive [New York] Times? The newly Murdochian [New York] Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch's fascist media? No. [Harris] can choose many ways to communicate her stands with others outside the old press and with the public directly. The old press can and should be bypassed.”
This missive set off many a journalist, such as NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, who replied, “Jeff, this just can't be the stance for any journalist who cares about the profession or the nation to take.”
How breathtakingly arrogant! As if you can’t care about the nation if you don’t think Harris should bow to the whims of the press.
Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, joined the debate, responding to Folkenflik:
And Jarvis hasn’t backed down. “When given a chance to ask questions, [the press sounds] like they're in a locker room, seeking quotes, not policy,” he added in another tweet. “This does nothing to inform the electorate. I know the argument about testing a candidate: but the press as currently configured aims for game & gotcha.”
What emerges from this debate shouldn’t be sympathy for a marginalized Beltway press. Instead, it should be anger at the imbalance in how that press has covered Democrats and Trump. Their coverage of Trump’s rallies normalizes his seconds of coherence, ignoring the hours of mad ramblings. They spent years fixated on President Joe Biden’s age, then wrote headlines like “The economy is strong but voters aren't feeling it. That's a problem for Biden.” They create the zeitgeist based on the narrative they want to push, and highlighting the success of Biden’s presidency was never in the cards.
But hey, they rush to their computers to file story after story about how this time, for real, Trump will finally be a changed man. We saw it after the July 13 assassination attempt, and we saw it when they credulously wrote headlines about Trump’s convention speech based on prepared remarks that he quickly abandoned. And they gloss over Trump’s rampant racism and sexism while eagerly awaiting his next childish schoolyard taunt against Harris. (“‘Krazy Kamala’ didn’t stick, so what will he try next? Details at 10!”)
Yes, Biden’s debate performance was a disaster, but so was Trump’s convention speech and his bizarrely slurred Monday conversation with billionaire Elon Musk. And that’s before we even get to the press’ inability to handle Trump’s pathological lies and fully grasp his promises of outright fascism.
Imagine if it wasn’t Trump but Harris who’d confidently declared that her opponent had “A.I.’d” the size of his crowds in photos. The press would engage in a multiweek feeding frenzy about her mental state. But with Trump? There’s the obligatory fact-check, but that’s about it.
Imagine if someone leaked Trump campaign emails and documents—would the press report on that with the same gusto as they did with the Hillary Clinton leaks in 2016? This time, we don’t have to imagine. It happened, and the Beltway media did exactly what we knew they would: refused to publish them. The same outlets that literally had live blogs of the Clinton leaks suddenly decided that their ethics forbade them from publishing whatever it was that they received.
And none have adequately explained why they’re handling the Trump emails differently, much less have apologized for the double standard.
Once more, this time with Harris, the Beltway media has decided to insert itself into the process, rather than report on it. How else do you explain The New York Times’ hissy fit over Biden’s refusal to sit for an interview with the outlet earlier this year, calling it a “dangerous precedent,” as if they were owed face time with the president? Biden didn’t owe them or any other media outlet shit, and neither does Harris.
And let’s take it one step further.
A presidential candidate’s job is to win. That’s it! So pray tell, how does talking to The New York Times or any other national media outlet help that cause? Either journalists will ask ridiculous, shallow questions and waste everyone’s time, or they’ll fish for a gotcha quote they can use to generate “controversy” and clicks. Or they might actually ask a policy question, which … no one cares. Literally, no one. For decades, Democrats issued reams of policy white papers, and no one cared. At best, those policy proclamations are ignored; at worst, they become attack fodder for the other party.
There are two candidates this election, and no one is basing their decision on the finer points of a policy platform. They are basing it on values. Republicans have known this and wielded it to great electoral success, and now Democrats are finally there. Watch that Walz clip above, and tell me how that doesn’t speak 1,000 times better to the heart of a Harris-Walz administration than some ridiculous question about what Harris would do with Lina Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission.
All of this being said, Harris should talk to local newspapers and TV reporters in battleground markets. There is research that suggests that local coverage can very much stimulate voter results.
But the national Beltway press? They need to reckon with their failures. Until then? Harris can speak to them if it tactically suits her campaign, but otherwise, she doesn’t owe them anything.
Donate what you can to help elect Kamala Harris!
That was a thing before social media and the internet, for sure. But today? The Beltway media is broken beyond repair, and we’re all doing fine learning about Harris on our own, thank you very much.
Margaret Sullivan, a columnist for The Guardian, echoed much of the press with her haughtily titled column “Kamala Harris must speak to the press,” published Tuesday. As Sullivan admits up front, Harris is riding high bypassing the traditional press, rising in the polls, and dominating media coverage.
“From a tactical or strategic point of view, there’s little reason” for Harris to give a sit-down interview or hold a press conference, Sullivan wrote.
She also admits the core reality of today’s Beltway media: “What’s more, when the vice-president has interacted with reporters in recent weeks, as in a brief ‘gaggle’ during a campaign stop, the questions were silly. Seeking campaign drama rather than substance, they centered on Donald Trump’s attacks or when she was planning to do a press conference.”
That should’ve been the end of the column. Harris doesn’t need the press, and when she does talk to them, they squander their opportunity on inanities. The end!
But no, Sullivan argues that Harris “owes it to every U.S. citizen to be frank and forthcoming about what kind of president she intends to be. To tell us—in an unscripted, open way—what she stands for. We don’t know much about that, other than vague campaign platitudes about ‘freedom’ and ‘not going back.’”
Sullivan is clearly confused, but I doubt that many of her readers are.
Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, don’t randomly throw out the word “freedom” and call it a day. They always explain it in the context of bodily autonomy, whether it’s about abortion rights, LGTBQ+ rights, or the ability to read a book without censors pitching it into a bonfire.
This recent speech by Walz might help Sullivan out:
Similarly, Harris and Walz use their unofficial slogan “We’re not going back” in context of Donald Trump’s disastrous four years as president. Has Sullivan forgotten those years already? Does she really not realize that “We’re not going back” is a counter to the explicitly regressive, backward-looking worldview contained in Trump’s “Make America Great Again”?
Either way, voters are very much liking what the Harris-Walz ticket is saying.
Regardless, Sullivan pushes forward in her column:
Do these questions matter? Sure. Do we need to know them to make a decision for president? Not now. Will they need to be addressed at some point? Sure, but it’s not like she needs a sit-down interview to do it. Will voters cast their ballot based on who the head of the Federal Trade Commission is? Doubtful.
Jeff Jarvis, a journalist and professor at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, reacted to that column with scorn, tweeting, “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive [New York] Times? The newly Murdochian [New York] Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch's fascist media? No. [Harris] can choose many ways to communicate her stands with others outside the old press and with the public directly. The old press can and should be bypassed.”
This missive set off many a journalist, such as NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik, who replied, “Jeff, this just can't be the stance for any journalist who cares about the profession or the nation to take.”
How breathtakingly arrogant! As if you can’t care about the nation if you don’t think Harris should bow to the whims of the press.
Norm Ornstein, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, joined the debate, responding to Folkenflik:
And Jarvis hasn’t backed down. “When given a chance to ask questions, [the press sounds] like they're in a locker room, seeking quotes, not policy,” he added in another tweet. “This does nothing to inform the electorate. I know the argument about testing a candidate: but the press as currently configured aims for game & gotcha.”
What emerges from this debate shouldn’t be sympathy for a marginalized Beltway press. Instead, it should be anger at the imbalance in how that press has covered Democrats and Trump. Their coverage of Trump’s rallies normalizes his seconds of coherence, ignoring the hours of mad ramblings. They spent years fixated on President Joe Biden’s age, then wrote headlines like “The economy is strong but voters aren't feeling it. That's a problem for Biden.” They create the zeitgeist based on the narrative they want to push, and highlighting the success of Biden’s presidency was never in the cards.
But hey, they rush to their computers to file story after story about how this time, for real, Trump will finally be a changed man. We saw it after the July 13 assassination attempt, and we saw it when they credulously wrote headlines about Trump’s convention speech based on prepared remarks that he quickly abandoned. And they gloss over Trump’s rampant racism and sexism while eagerly awaiting his next childish schoolyard taunt against Harris. (“‘Krazy Kamala’ didn’t stick, so what will he try next? Details at 10!”)
Yes, Biden’s debate performance was a disaster, but so was Trump’s convention speech and his bizarrely slurred Monday conversation with billionaire Elon Musk. And that’s before we even get to the press’ inability to handle Trump’s pathological lies and fully grasp his promises of outright fascism.
Imagine if it wasn’t Trump but Harris who’d confidently declared that her opponent had “A.I.’d” the size of his crowds in photos. The press would engage in a multiweek feeding frenzy about her mental state. But with Trump? There’s the obligatory fact-check, but that’s about it.
Imagine if someone leaked Trump campaign emails and documents—would the press report on that with the same gusto as they did with the Hillary Clinton leaks in 2016? This time, we don’t have to imagine. It happened, and the Beltway media did exactly what we knew they would: refused to publish them. The same outlets that literally had live blogs of the Clinton leaks suddenly decided that their ethics forbade them from publishing whatever it was that they received.
And none have adequately explained why they’re handling the Trump emails differently, much less have apologized for the double standard.
Once more, this time with Harris, the Beltway media has decided to insert itself into the process, rather than report on it. How else do you explain The New York Times’ hissy fit over Biden’s refusal to sit for an interview with the outlet earlier this year, calling it a “dangerous precedent,” as if they were owed face time with the president? Biden didn’t owe them or any other media outlet shit, and neither does Harris.
And let’s take it one step further.
A presidential candidate’s job is to win. That’s it! So pray tell, how does talking to The New York Times or any other national media outlet help that cause? Either journalists will ask ridiculous, shallow questions and waste everyone’s time, or they’ll fish for a gotcha quote they can use to generate “controversy” and clicks. Or they might actually ask a policy question, which … no one cares. Literally, no one. For decades, Democrats issued reams of policy white papers, and no one cared. At best, those policy proclamations are ignored; at worst, they become attack fodder for the other party.
There are two candidates this election, and no one is basing their decision on the finer points of a policy platform. They are basing it on values. Republicans have known this and wielded it to great electoral success, and now Democrats are finally there. Watch that Walz clip above, and tell me how that doesn’t speak 1,000 times better to the heart of a Harris-Walz administration than some ridiculous question about what Harris would do with Lina Khan, head of the Federal Trade Commission.
All of this being said, Harris should talk to local newspapers and TV reporters in battleground markets. There is research that suggests that local coverage can very much stimulate voter results.
But the national Beltway press? They need to reckon with their failures. Until then? Harris can speak to them if it tactically suits her campaign, but otherwise, she doesn’t owe them anything.
Donate what you can to help elect Kamala Harris!