Let's Stop Playing Dumb
Donald Trump's manipulations are transparent, and if reporters had more grit or integrity, the manipulation itself would be a big story.
Over the past several weeks, national political journalists have clamored on behalf of the guild for Kamala Harris to do more “unscripted” interviews.
In and of itself that’s not unusual behavior for the press corps, which typically comes shrouded in the same double speak. When reporters scold candidates for avoiding interviews, they usually mean “interviews with me, or my outlet, or outlets where my friends work.” News consumers would of course see through that kind of self-interested pitch, so they cloak the demand in the language of higher principle.
Thus, each time Harris has met their challenge as stated, they’ve sent their goalposts sailing over the horizon.
Politico even devoted a lede in its flagship newsletter to pretending 60 Minutes and Univision were softball liberal-fangirl outfits. “Let’s be real here,” wrote Rachel Bade. “Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about.”
That was Sunday, October 6. The next day, 60 Minutes aired its Harris feature, which subjected Harris and her running mate Tim Walz to contentious questions drawn heavily on bad faith Republican attacks.
But around the same time, something funny happened: Donald Trump backed out of his interview with 60 Minutes. Specifically, he backed out because 60 Minutes wouldn’t exempt him from its practice of fact checking news segments.
Then, when the Harris package aired, Republicans became upset that she didn’t melt into a puddle of goo, and began relentlessly attacking the program itself. 60 Minutes doesn’t run uncut interviews. It weaves newsworthy clips from its interviews into editorially authoritative stories about its subjects. Harris’s interview was no different. Nevertheless, Trump and MAGA fabricated a conspiracy theory in which CBS buried the unaired segments of Harris’s interview, because the footage was so damning. Trump has threatened to abuse his power in retaliation against CBS for this imaginary crime if he wins the presidency.
In the week since, reporters who didn’t get to interview Harris have shown much, much more interest in the merits of this campaign of propaganda against their colleagues at CBS than in the contents of the interview, which they claimed to believe were of such civic urgency.
The Associated Press swallowed Trump’s line whole.
Politico also, again, let Trump serve as its assignment editor.
Now remember: Trump bailed on his interview altogether. And he did so because he realized he’d get exposed for lying brazenly.
At the most basic level of consistency, national political journalists need to decide whether it’s important as a matter of first principles for presidential candidates to submit to unscripted, adversarial interviews, or whether it’s okay for candidates to engage in theater criticism of their opponents from the cheap seats without subjecting themselves to equal scrutiny.
But at a higher level, they should ask themselves a simple question: