The MRC's Kamala Interview Meltdown
The Media Research Center whined it was pointed out that if Kamala Harris' interview with CNN's Dana Bash hadn't gone so well, it and other right-wingers wouldn't be lashing out so furiously at Bash.
The Media Research Center labored hard to portray Kamala Harris as being afraid of the media because she didn’t do interviews immediately after becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. When Harris came close to an interview, Tim Graham spent an Aug. 27 post further building up that framing:
It’s been five weeks and counting since Kamala Harris emerged as the Democrat [sic] nominee and we’re still waiting for her to submit to her first sit-down interview with the press. She promised to get an interview “scheduled” by the end of August (or Saturday). It’s been a while — she was on Morning Joe two months ago to talk up abortion “access.”
In Tuesday’s Politico Playbook column, the reporters reported on how reporters are being asked which reporter should be selected for this weighty task.
Asking reporters about how to run your campaign is a classic suck-up tactic, since reporters think they are the smartest political strategists in America. It’s not just Democrats that play this game: then-Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter once praised Republican John McCain for talking to reporters about presidential campaign strategy out on the trail.
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The real goal is the perception of a substantive interview with a journalist who will gently keep Harris from putting her words in the salad shooter.
Graham concluded by sneering: “‘Harris World is also worrying about how to deploy her running mate Tim Walz in the media, because ‘he might not have a full command of where Harris is on every issue.’ They don’t think the main problem is having to explain his bucket of lies about his own resume??”
Curtis Houck ramped up the sneering after an interviewer had been chosen:
CNN announced on Tuesday during The Situation Room that they had won the unofficial sweepstakes between the liberal media broadcast and cable networks to score the first sit-down interview with the uber-sheltered Vice President Kamala Harris since she was coronated the Democrat Party’s presidential candidate on July 21 after President Biden was forced out.
Chief political correspondent Dana Bash will conduct the interview and, with running mate Tim Walz sitting in (as a crutch), it will be taped Thursday for a primetime special at 9:00 p.m. Eastern.
Houck then took shots at CNN political director David Chalian for sharing the news:
Chalian sounded like the liberal tool that he’s always been, gushing over this as the “next sort of important hurdle for Kamala Harris and her campaign to jump, which is after a very successful six weeks here since she became the Democratic nominee, coalesced the party behind her, raised a ton of money, injected enthusiasm, got a running mate, pulled off a convention”.
Chalian saw no reason to criticize Harris for avoiding the press, simply observing that Thursday will be “the first time she’s going to take questions in a — in a concerted effort like this, in an interview format since Joe Biden, six weeks ago, upended this entire race by making that historic decision to bow out of his campaign, endorse his Vice President, Kamala Harris, and that sent her on to these lasts six weeks here.”
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As for what issues Bash will discuss, Chalian argued that the questions (read: softballs) will include “the most important issues, time and again in every poll, the economy is number one above all, the cost of living, those are things that Kamala Harris herself addressed in that speech in North Carolina a couple of weeks ago, but to flesh that out, no doubt.”
You know who else seeks out interviewers with softball questions? Graham and Houck, as well as other MRC staffers. They only appear on right-wing channels like Newsmax, where they are guaranteed never to be asked about their rampant bias and shoddy “media research.” Indeed, Graham pretty much bailed on appearing in non-right-wing media after John Avlon wiped the floor with him in a 2016 CNN interview.
Then it was work-the-refs time — yet it had to work hard to smear Bash. An Aug. 28 post by Bill D’Agostino conceded that “Bash surprised just about everyone during the first (and only) presidential debate between Biden and Trump” — “everyone” being D’Agostino’s hateful MRC co-workers — by not playing into the MRC’s biased caricature of her and co-moderator, framing them as being “were remarkably reserved.” But the refs must be worked even if reality shows otherwise, and he does just that:
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.
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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:
Alex Christy served up the kind of ref-working he did before the first debate by cranking out “a wide variety of 30 questions that Bash could ask that might actually help voters make an informed choice in a couple of months.” Far from being a “wide variety,” they were devised to amplify right-wing narratives such as:
Should death row inmates have the right to vote?
How can you secure the border when you previously stated it should not be a crime to enter the U.S. illegally?
How can voters trust you on the economy when even liberal Washington Post columnists are attacking your price control plan?
Did you really work at McDonald’s? You never mentioned it until you decided to run for president?
Christy concluded by laughably insisting his ridiculously biased questions were about “substance”: “Bash has an opportunity to force Harris and Walz to focus on substance. Asking the questions on this list will be a good test of CNN’s desire to make the election about issues rather than personalities.”
When the interview itself went well, it was sour-grapes time. Jorge Bonilla groused:
The American people were promised, by CNN, an interview of Vice President Kamala Harris — the first since she became the presumptive Democratic nominee. But the public received no such interview, hype notwithstanding. Instead, voters were treated to a melánge of talking-point set pieces, the kind one normally sees at a debate. In essence, this was little more than a debate dress rehearsal.
Such is the coddling given by the media to Harris that a routine post-rollout interview is hyped as “a watershed moment” by Regime propagandist Dana Bash. We were all forewarned.
Bonilla similarly served up a partisan dumping on Walz:
Shortly thereafter, Walz gets asked about his misrepresentations of his military service. In listening to Walz’s response blaming bad grammar for his assertion that he carried “weapons of war” while “in war”, one is reminded of Celia Cruz and her classic “my English is not very good looking”. Walz never does provide a response on stolen valor, pivoting instead to abortion:
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Moving on to the portion of the program addressing Joe Biden, Harris expresses no regret of defending Biden’s ability to serve. Bash’s followup on incumbency enables another set piece you can expect to see at the debate- Harris throwing off her incumbency and positioning herself as a challenger running against the Trump Era:
Bonilla ultimately whined:
Harris-Walz emerge from this debate rehearsal unscathed, unburdened from the prospect of having to face persistent follow-up questions and never having to worry about getting cut off mid-answer or getting “fact-checked in real time”, as is often the case with Republicans sitting down with Regime Media.
To call this an interview is an egregious insult to interviews everywhere. The Regime should be pleased, given that its new figurehead emerged largely unscathed. But voters are probably coming away from this with more questions than answers.
Bonilla has obviously never watched an “interview” of Trump by anyone on Fox News, Newsmax or any other right-wing channel — or maybe he has, which is why Bonilla’s MRC co-workers only appear on those channels because they know they will get the same softballs Trump does.
Christy returned to grumble that Bash didn’t sufficiently bow to his biased questioning demands:
Prior to CNN’s Thursday interview with the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, we suggested 30 questions that Dana Bash might ask the duo in their much-hyped first interview. But when it came time to sit down to talk in Savannah, Bash only asked five of them.
Bash did manage to ask Harris about her fracking flip-flop, “Do you still want to ban fracking?… In 2019, I believe in a town hall, you said — you were asked, would you commit to implementing a federal ban on fracking on your first day in office? And you said: There’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking. So, yes. So, it changed in the — in that campaign?”
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The president’s most important role is that of commander-in-chief and keeping the country safe. The words “China,” “Russia,” and “Iran” did not appear once. The only foreign policy question was from the left: “Would you withhold some U.S. weapons shipments to Israel? That’s what a lot of people on the progressive left want you to do.”
On the economy, Bash declined to press Harris on her radical price control plan or how she could address the debt while not cutting spending or if she and Biden overspent, causing inflation.
Likewise, when Walz hyped the ticket’s stance on abortion, Bash refused to question him on his radical record as governor of Minnesota and Harris on if she supports any limits. Nor did she ask about Title IX and the issue of transgender individuals competing in women’s sports.
Bash further declined to press Harris on what she would do when Democratic interest groups collide with each other. She did not mention union concerns about electric vehicles. While she mentioned far-left concerns about Gaza, she did not mention potential Title VI violations during anti-Israel demonstrations on college campuses.
She did not ask Harris if she still thinks America is a systemically racist country or favors Supreme Court expansion.
Christy further whined that ” CNN asks Walz’s GOP counterpart, JD Vance, if he was making light of suicide by posting a nearly 20-year-old video clip of a Miss Teen USA beauty pageant.” As Christy’s writeup of that interview makes clear, Vance refused to apologize for his sick joke — which, of course, Christy gave Vance a pass on, only grudgingly admitting that the pageant contestant “had to put up with a lot of garbage for one embarrassing moment that, unfortunately, happened to occur in front of the whole world,” then baselessly claimed that she “agrees with Vance, as she was able to laugh through an Access Hollywood interview in 2021 about the incident.” Christy didn’t explain how the contestant could agree with Vance three years before he tweeted his smear.
Attacking CNN
The Media Research Center played work-the-refs with CNN’s Dana Bash before her interview with Kamala Harris, even demanding that Bash ask her its laundry list of biased questions – then pouted when Bash largely ignored them. From there, the MRC whined that non-right-wing media refused to hate the interview as much as it does. Christy huffed in an Aug. 30 post:
After Vice President Kamala Harris’s Thursday interview with CNN, the cast of MSNBC’s 11th Hour could not defend her against accusations of flip-flopping on issues such as fracking, so instead they decided to portray such reversals as “clever” while wondering if she is the victim of a double standard.
Guest host and former Harris spokeswoman Symone Sanders-Townsend teed up a clip of the interview, “Vice President Kamala Harris has been accused—not even accused, like, it is a fact that she said a number of things in 2020, in her 2020 campaign that she has now shifted her stance on, and she responded to a number of those criticisms tonight. Watch this.”
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Even CNN’s fact-checker, Daniel Dale, was unimpressed by such alleged cleverness. As vice president, Harris supports whatever Joe Biden supports. Citing what she did as vice president does not answer questions on how she would govern as president in her own right.
Chief Trump pillow-fluffer Houck whined in another post that day:
On Friday, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC opened their flagship morning news shows by rhetorically gallivanting over Thursday night’s CNN exclusive interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) (after having not done an interview since President Biden was forced out).
ABC’s Good Morning America had their chief regime pillow fluffer, Mary Bruce, again do her best North Korean news lady impression, gushing over Harris as “methodical” and “defending her record with President Biden” in her first “in-depth interview…since she was catapulted to the top of the ticket”.
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Bruce even admitted Harris remained vague about what she’d do as president, but the Biden-Harris tool put a positive spin on it: “Harris is surging in the polls, narrowly leading Donald Trump nationally. Asked what she would do on day one, Harris light on specifics.”
Bruce added Harris was “adamant in defending her and Biden’s record on the economy, but concede[d]” that, in Harris’s words, “[t]here is more work to do.”
On NBC’s Today, co-host Craig Melvin also praised Bash by saying Harris “faced some tough questions about her change in policy positions.”
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Finally, CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil began the show by describing Harris as having “defended her evolving positions on a range of issues and responded to attacks from former President Donald Trump.”
“Look, this interview comes as voters are trying to learn more about Harris in this compressed timeframe. So, she explained some of her shifting positions,” said White House and campaign correspondent Ed O’Keefe.
Mark Finkelstein groused in his daily hate-watch of “Morning Joe”:
Was that David Plouffe? Brian Fallon? Maybe the Second Gentleman himself? Surely no one from outside Kamala Harris’ inner campaign circle would have had the chutzpah to use the term “soaring rhetoric” to describe Kamala Harris’ pedestrian-at-best performance during her CNN interview last night!
But no! It was actually Jeremy Peters, an MSNBC contributor and New York Times “reporter” on today’s Morning Joe–which tells you all you need to know about the New York Times, MSNBC, and the liberal media at large.
“She’s really positioned herself in a way that should scare Republicans,” chirped Peters.”What you see, I think, is the kind of soaring rhetoric from her about uniting the country that a lot of people are really hungry for.”
It doesn’t matter that it’s remarkably phony — remember, Joe Biden also campaigned as a uniter, and then as president compared Republicans to Jim Crow segregationists. He said “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.”
Graham grumbled in his Aug. 30 podcast:
Kamala Harris finally submitted to an interview after 39 days as Biden’s sudden replacement. Pundits said this long-running boycott of the press raised the stakes of this interview, but Bash wasn’t chosen because she would punish Harris for her avoidance. Bash made a few attempts to capture her slippery moves away from radical stands she took during her failed campaign in 2019. But Harris was allowed broad freedom to explain it away.
Jorge Bonilla sat through it all and has thoughts. Harris was largely allowed to talk at length with what were probably well-rehearsed answers she had worked on for days. It could be seen as preparation for the September 10 debate.
Bash’s worst question was the open-ended one about President Biden’s mental decline: “Right after the debate, you insisted that President Biden is extraordinarily strong. Given where we are now, do you have any regrets about what you told the American people?” Harris was able to say she had no regrets and then tout Biden and his record.
Afterward, CNN analyst Scott Jennings responded: “I also thought it was interesting that she didn’t take any responsibility at the end for telling the American people that Joe Biden was fine and he was strong when we all know that’s not true. That’s why he’s out of the race and she’s still standing by the idea he was fine and he’s strong and then he’s fine today. Nobody believes that…”
Graham didn’t disclose that Jennings is a biased right-wing activist, so it’s not a surprise he would bash Harris and Biden.
The next day, Graham lost it when a CNN commentator gave away the MRC’s game — that the only reason they’re bashing the interview is because Harris did well:
On their regular “Week In Politics” chat on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday, host Scott Simon asked NPR senior Washington correspondent Ron Elving how Kamala Harris and Tim Walz performed in their sit-down CNN interview. Elving said you knew they were fine because conservatives trashed CNN and Dana Bash after it aired.
SCOTT SIMON: Vice President Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, gave their first broadcast interview since they became the Democratic ticket. I – you know, you have to ask it like you’re asking a theater critic. How do you think they did?
RON ELVING: I’d say they held their own, and you knew they had because the conservative media sphere erupted in criticism of the interview and CNN and the host of the show, Dana Bash.
The only snippet NPR aired was Harris saying “my values have not changed” on the fracking question. Elving said that was natural. It’s “what candidates say when they’ve switched positions,” a “classic shift” when she joined Joe Biden’s ticket. “Now she’s on her own, and she’s sticking with the Biden view and saying she’s learned a lot about growing the green economy without banning fracking.”
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Simon wrapped up the segment by asking how important the ABC presidential debate would be on September 10. Elving said the ratings will be enormous, much larger than the Dana Bash interview (with six million viewers). He predicted Trump would be a bully, but Harris could be close to victory: “Trump can be counted on to do all he can to bulldoze Harris off the stage. But if she holds her ground, she’ll be closer than ever to being the first woman president.”
Graham will never come out and admit that his job and that of his MRC underlings are being paid to keep Harris from winning — because if he did, it would jeopardize the MRC’s nonprofit status. He also won’t admit that Elving was quite correct in his evaluation of right-wing attacks on CNN over the interview.