Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple published a surprising chat with liberal Post columnists Perry Bacon and David von Drehle. It's surprising because the liberals agreed that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz should submit to interviews with Fox News. Wemple merely asked what approach they should take with Fox.
Bacon replied: "Based on her strategy now, shouldn’t she do an interview at the border with Fox and talk about the border agents she is going to hire? Not just to reach the Fox audience. The coverage of 'Kamala goes to Fox' would reinforce the openness to the other side she is trying to communicate. That would reach center/center-right people who are not Fox watchers."
Von Drehle added: "I think the campaign should make Walz available 24/7 to Fox. He ran for Congress and won in a red district again and again. They have no moves that he hasn’t seen 100 times. And they should put Harris on “Fox & Friends” one time to say that they did. If she can’t handle Steve Doocy, she doesn’t deserve to be president."
Earlier in the chat, Wemple asked about the softball CNN interview with Dana Bash: "Couldn’t Bash, though, have pushed a bit harder on what Harris knew about Biden’s fitness for office and how she viewed his decline over time?"
"Yes. I think there was only one question about Biden’s fitness versus, by my count, four questions on fracking," Bacon replied.
Bacon suggested this line of questioning was exploited while the interview aired on TV: "Harris’s campaign sent out emails during the interview touting the new, more centrist stands she was declaring on CNN, such as promising to not ban fracking and not supporting the Green New Deal. In some ways, Bash played into Harris’s strategy by asking repeatedly about Harris abandoning more liberal positions from 2019. Harris is eager to move to the center. So this seemed like a “tough” interview — Bash kept implying Harris is a flip-flopper — but Harris seems happy to flip to the center/right."
Von Drehle put in two cents: "Harris wants to look like a flip-flopper. 2019 and early 2020 were as far left as the Democratic Party has gone in more than 50 years — all the way back to 1972. Harris got caught up in that madness. She needed to cure that, and the only way to do it is with some flip-flopping."
Bacon was disappointed CNN pushed the "news" that Harris would put a Republican in her cabinet as the big takeaway, which isn't really news at all (Democrats like to put in a token).
Wemple noted Biden and Harris avoiding interviews, that "clearly there’s a theme here, one of circumventing the mainstream media and choosing other methods of getting out your message."
"I think Harris and Walz got the news media off their backs. They ended a narrative (she won’t take questions) that implied she was afraid or wasn’t smart enough to do that," Bacon said. "I expect (unfortunately) very little engagement with the media from here on out from the Harris campaign. Its strategy is that interviews take them off message. I thought the no-interviews strategy was because of Biden (who is aging and struggles to answer questions). Now, I think this is a new, anti-mainstream media approach from Democrats."
