In the five weeks since Kamala Harris took over President Joe Biden’s struggling presidential campaign, she’s notably avoided any substantive interactions with the press — no sit down interviews, no long press conferences. Two weeks ago, she suggested her media blackout might end before Labor Day.
“I want us to get an interview scheduled before the end of the month,” Harris promised reporters at an extremely brief (70 seconds) Q & A with reporters in Michigan back on August 8.
Yet looking at the record of the past 20 years, Harris has absolutely no reason to avoid a press corps overwhelmingly dominated by liberals. Democratic presidential nominees have never had a problem finding friendly journalists who will toss easy softballs, inviting the nominee to bash their Republican opponent while showcasing their own warm wonderfulness.
Let’s start with 2004. Prior to the Democratic National Convention, John Kerry, running mate John Edwards and their wives popped up for a lovefest on CBS’s 60 Minutes. “How do you think the honeymoon is going?” correspondent Lesley Stahl asked on the July 11, 2004 program.
She prompted Kerry: “You seem so pumped up since you chose Senator Edwards as your running mate. You’re looser. Do you think his energy is rubbing off on you?”
Eleven days later, CBS’s Dan Rather tried to help Kerry squelch the controversy over Kerry’s stint as a Navy Lieutenant by pushing him to denigrate then-President Bush’s record. “Speaking of angry, have you ever had any anger about President Bush — who spent his time during the Vietnam War in the National Guard — running, in effect, a campaign that does its best to diminish your service in Vietnam? You have to be at least irritated by that, or have you been?”
“Yup, I have been,” Kerry agreeably replied.
Then on July 30, the morning after Kerry’s convention address, he was subjected to another easy-going interview, this time from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “Did you beat your own expectations,” Stephanopoulos asked about the speech. “Did the American people see into your soul last night?”
Four years later, the Democrats’ standard-bearer was Illinois Senator Barack Obama, and the media were in full swoon. NBC’s Brian Williams got an interview with Obama for the July 24, 2008 Nightly News, as the Senator toured Europe.
“When an American politician comes to Berlin, we’ve had some iconic utterances in the past. We’ve had ‘Ich bin ein.’ We’ve had, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,’” Williams asked, prematurely placing Obama alongside John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan in the pantheon of Presidents. “Is the phraseology that you would like remembered: ‘People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment, this is our time’?”
The next month, following the Democratic convention, Obama appeared on the August 31, 2008 60 Minutes. Correspondent Steve Kroft began with a worshipful account of the nominee’s speech the previous Thursday night: “He attracted 84,000 people to Invesco Field in Denver, and another 40 million to their television sets all across America. More Americans saw the speech than watched the opening ceremony of the Olympics.”
As often happens, Kroft resorted to a “question” for Obama that amounted to a repackaging of Democratic talking points. “Does the fact that he [Senator John McCain] chose as his Vice President [Alaska Governor Sarah Palin] someone who has less experience than you take that weapon out of his arsenal?”
Four years later, during Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, Brian Williams chipped in with a May 2, 2012 Rock Center special that cast the President in heroic terms for ordering the raid that killed terrorist leader Osama bin Laden a year earlier.
Without the slightest evidence, Williams speculated Obama would have faced a Watergate-level scandal if the mission hadn’t succeeded. Recalling the disastrous attempt to rescue American hostages from Iran in 1980, he dramatically asked Obama: “If this had failed in spectacular fashion, it would have blown up your presidency, I think, by all estimates. It would have been your Waterloo and perhaps your Watergate, consumed with hearings and inquiries. How thick did the specter of Jimmy Carter, Desert One hang in the air here?”
The following week (May 10, 2012), Good Morning America’s Robin Roberts didn’t exactly give Obama the third degree in the interview in which the President announced that he now approved of marriage for same-sex couples.
Roberts confided to co-host George Stephanopulos: “Let me tell you, George — I’m getting chills again — because when you sit in that room and you hear him say those historic words, it was not lost on anyone that was in the room....”
Two months later, as the conventions neared, CBS’s Charlie Rose treated Obama to a typical (for Democrats) set of softball questions on the July 15, 2012 CBS Sunday Morning.
He asked Obama about White House life: “It’s not a bad place to live....Well, you got a basketball court; you got a tennis court. You have a fountain. You can see the Washington Monument.”
Another grueling question: “[If] you didn’t have all of these important things to do, and you could travel to anyplace in the world, where would you want to go? What would you want to see and experience?”
As for ObamaCare, Rose invited the President to take a victory lap: “You had an enormously successful health care legislation [sic], because the Supreme Court did not declare it unconstitutional. That’s your proudest achievement in the first four years?”
In 2016, Rose was back, indulging Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton with a July 19, 2016 interview where he repeatedly invited her to trash her Republican opponent: “Do you believe Donald Trump is dangerous?....Donald Trump with his finger on a nuclear bomb would be a threat to civilization?....The most dangerous man ever to run for President of the United States?”
Five days later (July 24, 2016), Clinton returned to CBS for a 60 Minutes interview prior to her own convention. Evening News anchor Scott Pelley asked the former Secretary of State to place herself in the history books: “What will be accomplished if you are elected the first woman President of the United States?”
Clinton answered, “I think it would be a great moment for our country....”
Following the Democrats’ 2020 convention, ABC hosted Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris for a primetime post-convention interview conducted by World News Tonight anchor David Muir and GMA’s Robin Roberts.
Muir prompted Biden to blame President Trump for the COVID’s death toll: “The pandemic — more than 170,000 American lives lost now — Mr. Vice President, you have said that people are dying because of this negligence. Do you blame President Trump for lives lost?...Do you think the negligence on the part of this administration has cost lives?”
When it was her turn, Roberts began with a softball for Biden: “You said that you wanted to select a vice president that had strengths and qualities that you don’t have. So, what strengths, qualities, does Senator Harris have that you don’t?” Biden launched into promoting Harris: “She has enormous strength....”
Roberts later asked Harris: “You both lost a loved one. Your mother was a cancer researcher and was taken by the disease. This is a bond that you all have and sharing?”
Two weeks later (September 4, 2020), Biden held a press conference to blast Trump for a story in The Atlantic that used unnamed sources to claim the President had belittled American soldiers. Reporter after reporter pitched him softballs begging him to slam Trump even more harshly.
The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere used his first question to amplify the anonymous quotes that Biden was using as the basis of his complaint: “When you hear these remarks — suckers, losers, recoiling from amputees — what does it tell you about the President’s soul and the life he leads?”
CBS’s Ed O’Keefe beseeched Biden to be fiercer: “You said today is the angriest you’ve been as a presidential candidate. But you said you’re trying to restrain yourself. There’s a lot of people out there that are supporting you, or are inclined to not vote for the President, who would say why isn’t Joe Biden angrier about all of this?”
In no universe could these be considered tough questions. Instead, they’re cues to various Democratic politicians from fellow partisans in the supposedly neutral press.
Not every reporter would bow down before a politician like this, but the record shows there are many who would, and have. It makes you wonder why Kamala Harris hasn’t already jumped at the chance to let the media lend a hand to her campaign.
For more examples from our flashback series, which we call the NewsBusters Time Machine, go here.
