The legacy media, and Republican operatives, are in a constant state of meltdown over the Harris-Walz campaign not doing sit-down interviews, which strikes me as odd.
Oddity #1: Are we trying to frame Donald Trump talking with Sean Hannity and other personality news types from the far-right media as him doing sit-down interviews?
Fox News, Newsmax and the like take Trump’s random phone calls and give him free reign to spout his lies and related nonsense un-fact-checked.
This is not him doing anything strenuous; it’s him holding court.
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Oddity #2: The legacy media types browbeating the Harris-Walz campaign over the interview issue are also going full-throat they aren’t releasing any policy positions, which, again, seriously?
Can anyone reading this point to a single policy position from the Trump-Vance-RFK Jr. campaign?
And, no, Trump ranting about Democrats being communists isn’t a policy position.
He keeps saying he wants to slap tariffs on China, which I guess is a policy position, and also an economic-policy disaster in the making, given that the cost of the tariffs would end up just getting passed on to consumers, in the form of higher prices.
That Trump doesn’t seem to understand this basic reality undercuts the idea that it’s an actual policy position.
Kamala Harris has made clear that she intends to lead a reversal of the Trump Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned reproductive-rights freedoms that had been enshrined in law for 50 years by Roe v. Wade.
Isn’t that a policy position?
She’s reaffirmed our support for Ukraine as it defends itself from Russian aggression, which is another policy position.
Trump, for his part, has a secret plan to end the war, in the style of Nixon.
If you know already that his secret plan is to let Putin do whatever he wants, you win the pony.
Back to Harris: she reaffirmed our support for NATO, which Trump, serving the interests of his buddy, Putin, wants dismantled.
And she has pledged to maintain Social Security, which Trump and his far-right allies in Congress have threatened to cut.
Trump wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a plan that he promised us years ago was better, but he hasn’t seen fit to share with the rest of us.
The Harris policy on ACA is, it’s working, let’s keep it going.
Given all of this, I can’t blame the Harris team for not wanting to sit down with a news media that pretends that Trump bloviating to his golf buddies is taking hard questions, pretends that he has articulated hard policy positions when he hasn’t, and pretends that she hasn’t gone into depth and detail on her policy positions when she has, because we can all see where this is going.
CNN, for example, its ratings are down big-time since the end of the Trump administration. The Washington Post is on its last legs with dramatic reader and subscription declines post-Trump.
The New York Times seems to be doing OK, but its recent push on both-sidesism is a clear signal that it has its finger on the scale, and you don’t have to wonder why.
They’re not giving Trump a free pass and badgering Harris because they’re just doing their jobs; they need eyeballs to be able to pay the bills, and they decided back in 2015 that Trump brings the eyeballs.
If I’m the Harris-Walz team, I’m not talking to any of them, not in 2024, when you don’t really need a legacy news media to be able to communicate directly with people without their Trump-colored filters.
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Chris Graham
