Meet the press? Hold that thought. The candidate interview isn’t what it used to be

During Kamala Harris exciting ride that rocked the 2024 presidential campaign, most journalists have been on the outside looking in. The vice president has given no interviews and has barely engaged with reporters since becoming the Democratic pick to replace Joe Biden.

That’s about to change now that it’s become a campaign issue. But for journalists, the biggest lesson is that their role as presidential gatekeepers is probably diminishing forever.

Harris travels with reporters on Air Force Two and speaks frequently with them, but her campaign team insists the conversations are confidential. Off the plane on Thursday, she approached cameras and notebooks to publicly answer a few questions, and one of them was about when she would sit down for an in-depth interview.

“I talked to my team,” she said. “I want us to schedule an interview together by the end of the month.”

She spoke on the same afternoon that her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, delivered a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago resort, in part to contrast with Harris. “She’s not smart enough to hold a press conference,” Trump said. His vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, posted a comment on social media to point out that Trump was doing something that Harris didn’t do.

Given that modern presidential campaigns are essentially marketing operations, Harris’ position is not surprising. For teams supporting candidates, “the goal is to control the message as much as possible,” said Kevin Madden, a Republican communications strategist who was a senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

Interviews and press conferences eliminate this control. Candidates are at the mercy of the questions raised by journalists — even if they try to change the subject. The media decides which responses are interesting and will be chopped and diced into soundbites that circulate across social media, often devoid of the context in which they were uttered.

In such an environment, the value and perception of the in-person interview has changed – for both journalists and candidates.

When Trump appeared last month in interview format before the National Association of Black Journalists, his aides almost certainly didn’t want to. the main headline be about the candidate suggesting that Harris misled voters about her race.

Between Instagram, Tik-Tok, television rallies, emails or text messages, campaigns today have many other ways to convey their message to potential voters. This lessens the need to interact directly with journalists, Madden said.

“Presidential campaigns are increasingly conducted as performances before a sympathetic audience, invited to watch and listen but not to question or respond,” wrote The New York Times in a recent article. editorial.

Harris’s unusual late entry into the race means she has bypassed voter vetting, often with journalists as her surrogates, which takes on a more important role in the early stages of a nomination fight, where a more intimate form of retail politics ranges. from state to state. That makes it even more important that she be available to talk about her background and plans, the paper argued.

“Americans deserve the opportunity to ask questions of those who seek to lead their government,” the editorial said.

The Times editorial board requested an interview with Harris and did not receive a response, a spokesperson said. The same thing happened to Biden before he dropped out.

Harris and his team may be learning from their boss; Biden has lagged behind previous presidents in the number of interviews granted and press conferences held. That changed after the June debate with Trump, which sent his re-election effort into a death spiral; televised interviews with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and NBC’s Lester Holt did little to change that trajectory.

Trump has been more available, but he often speaks to people who are unlikely to challenge him. Since July 5, he has given interviews to Fox News personalities Maria Bartiromo, Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters, Harris Faulkner, Brian Kilmeade and Sean Hannity. He also appeared twice on “Fox & Friends morning show.

Between these interviews — often cut and aired on other networks — and an endless stream of posts on his Truth Social website, Trump is “a content machine,” Madden said.

Trump’s press conference was broadcast live on CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, although CNN and MSNBC cut before it ended to check some of the facts.

Fox also frequently pointed out the issue of Harris’ lack of access. “Trump answers questions while Harris dodges the media,” read one of the messages on the network screen as Trump spoke.

“We can’t be the only media company talking about this,” Fox’s Bill Hemmer said Tuesday, referencing the upcoming Democratic national convention. “She went sixteen days without a meaningful interview. Is it possible she will run out of time until Chicago? That would be extraordinary. then you would have to ask yourself. What are you hiding? What is your team hiding from?

Madden said that although the interviews are less important than they once were, there are still some undecided voters who want to see them to help make their choices. That’s why he hopes it happens.

“You want to control it as much as possible,” he said. “They’ve had so much momentum over the last few weeks that they haven’t had to actually sit down and present their case directly to reporters. .The day is certainly coming.

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Associated Press reporters Seung Min Kim and Will Weissert in Washington and Darlene Superville in Romulus, Michigan, contributed to this report. David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him on http://twitter.com/dbauder.