After nearly 40 days of no interviews or press conferences, Kamala Harris has finally decided to grace CNN’s Dana Bash with her presence in a safe, pre-taped two-on-one interview featuring VP pick Tim Walz. The Harris team certainly knew what they were doing when they selected Bash for this job; she’s been one of TV news’s most persistent Biden White House defenders, and her interviews with Democrats almost always include a handful of softballs and non-questions.
Bash surprised just about everyone during the first (and only) presidential debate between Biden and Trump. Despite their obvious disdain for the former President, both Bash and co-moderator Jake Tapper were remarkably reserved. They never interrupted either candidate with unsolicited “fact checks,” they allowed both men roughly the same amount of speaking time, and they even had a few tough questions for President Biden.
This upcoming Harris event, however, could be a different story. In interviews like the one planned for Thursday, the journalist is supposed to play the role of the stand-in opponent, pressing the candidate on their policy stances, their vision, and perhaps even their past gaffes. In this kind of role, Bash has a much longer record for us to examine, and it’s not stellar.
Here's a sampling:
Bash is prone to asking Democrats questions that sound like hardballs for Republicans. For example, she recently teed up Commerce Secretary Pete Buttigieg to excoriate Republican VP Candidate JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comment (“What’s your response to that?”).
She played the same game with Senator Laphonza Butler (D-CA) on August 4 of this year, offering her guest free rein to lambast Trump for his comments about Harris’s ethnicity:
The former president falsely claimed that the Vice President, quote, “happened to turn black,” for political reasons…
You are the only black woman right now serving in the U.S. Senate. You have known the Vice President for a long time. What do you make of all this?
While Bash’s bias is obvious during interviews, outside of them it borders on absurd. In March of this year, CNN’s Inside Politics ran a full segment about President Biden’s March Madness bracket, of all things. “President Biden has entered the March Madness chat,” Bash announced excitedly, then asked correspondent Coy Wire, “What do you make of the President’s bracket?”
Back when Jack Smith was still the shining hope of pro-Democrat journalists everywhere, Bash wasted an entire segment of her show cooing over “new and exclusive CNN video of the Special Counsel at Subway.” As in, the sandwich shop. She continued:
CNN’s Evan Perez was there, trying to track down the Special Counsel. I won’t ask you about all of the less important things about what he got and how he paid, and all that. But what is important is the imagery here. They clearly wanted us to see him.
While she’s not subtle about her partisan loyalties, there is admittedly another side to Bash: the one we saw back in late June who defied expectations and delivered a surprisingly fair Trump/Biden debate. Which version of CNN’s Dana Bash will show up on Thursday to speak with Vice President Harris and her emotional support Governor? Only time will tell.
