Why should Kamala Harris bother with the news media?

Kamala Harris points up and speaks from behind the vice presidential seal as people in the background raise campaign signs

Aug. 15, 2024 3 AM PT

Hello and happy Thursday. There are 81 days until the election, and today we are talking about stayin’ alive — for the Harris campaign, the Trump whatever-it-is and for us voters who have 11-plus weeks to go.

And for democracy. Don’t forget democracy!

First, I know you’ve seen the AI-generated video of Donald Trump and Elon Musk dancing to the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” Trump also posted it on his Truth Social, where truth goes to die.

This bromance is hard to watch. Musk’s power and privilege seem to be veering him into Howard Hughes-weird territory, where his crazy theories are matched only by his unique ability to foist them on the rest of us. And Trump will love anyone who loves him — or who has a lot of money. Sad.

Put the two together (as they were for two-plus hours this week during a platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter conversation with 1 million people listening) and you have something more than unfortunate or strange.

You have something dangerous — two of the most influential men in the world undermining democracy with lies.

There are no consequences for Musk, and few for Trump. This election is a broken info-pipe of raw sewage spewing in every direction, and these guys are boogieing down in the muck.

Which brings me to the news media, and Kamala Harris doing her own dance around its questions.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, in front of a blue backdrop reading "Harris Walz" in large white type, wave to people off-camera

Elite argument

So apparently, the Bee Gees saw this coming.

In their 1977 disco hit, which was not in fact about dancing, but about surviving on the mean streets of America, the Gibb brothers sang, “We can try to understand the New York Times’ effect on man,” a catchy indictment of the power of society to crush souls.

These days, it’s really society’s effect on the media that’s crushing.

We’re driving the media crazy. News outlets can’t understand why we don’t love them anymore.

A kerfuffle has broken out among the elite of the national political corps about whether Harris is dodging the press — and whether that would be a good or bad move for winning the White House. The New York Times has run stories about it. So has this paper.

This has led to much pontificating from columnists more politically seasoned than myself on whether Harris is smart in taking her messaging straight to the people in rallies and on platforms such as TikTok, or whether it’s an affront to both voters and democracy to avoid traditional on-the-record interviews with reporters.

Yes, like Trump, Harris hasn’t really laid out any specific policies.

But also, she hasn’t needed to. It has been less than a month since President Biden dropped out, and Harris is still high on a tsunami of good will. If we don’t know her specific plans, we do know some of her key positions: pro-choice, pro-union, pro-democracy, anti-hate.

For now, anyway, that seems to be enough — to win, if not to please the media.

Good strategy, bad precedent

So Harris can’t be faulted for her strategy of dodging the press. It just makes sense for a campaign that has just over 11 weeks to go — and at least for the next two weeks, a convention that will fill coverage. That will leave her nine weeks.

I am certain she will sit down with some well-known journalist at some point. But what would be the advantage of rushing that?

The news cycles after any major interview will without a doubt pick her apart. MAGA will grasp onto something that comes out of it (“radical left” policies, meandering answers) and Harris will have to ride that out.

Meanwhile, the talking points that could keep her momentum going will be largely buried in the wake of a big interview.

Take Florida’s Amendment 4, a ballot measure aimed at overturning Ron DeSantis’ six-week abortion ban, for example. Not only does that amendment possibly put Florida in play as a state Democrats could win, it also should force Trump to go on the record about how he will vote on it (he’s registered in Florida).

Wouldn’t Harris be better off, say, having a sit-down with the president of Planned Parenthood, or the youthful voters of NextGen America — sticking to message in a friendly platform, no different than the Trump-Musk bro-down?

If I were advising Harris, I would tell her to put off a major interview at least a few more weeks — someplace after the convention but not too close to the election, where it will work to quash some of the angry media rumblings (because truthfully, it’s the press demanding access, not the voters) but also leave room for other news cycles.

That’s cynical, but that’s where we are at.

But.

The Fourth Estate isn’t a subdivision in Jersey

The media does matter, and it is the Fourth Estate for a reason. This election, with its twists, turns and breakneck speed, may be a challenge for the press. But in a functioning democracy, the press is an essential ingredient of informed decision-making.

There are lots of external factors that have eroded that — social media along with Google, stealing away the ability of news organizations to turn a profit. Venture capitalists eating newsrooms like vultures on roadkill. The subsequent cuts and closures that have left newsrooms small and overworked.

But also, as someone who jumped into national political coverage about 32 seconds ago, I can tell you the political media is insular and often is blind to what average folks care about beyond topics like “the economy.”

The reality is that journalism isn’t an elite profession like being a surgeon or a nuclear physicist. It’s a trade — a repetitive skill set best learned on the job, from one generation to the next.

If this election is indeed like a broken sewer pipe, spewing a stream of info-poop in every direction, do you call a professor to fix it? A doctor?

Nope. You need an info-plumber — which is what a good journalist is. We know what’s in those pipes, we know how to get it out, and we know how to clean it up so it doesn’t make democracy sick.

And that’s where the media has gone wrong. We’re pretending to be at a fancy-schmancy belle epoque salon, when in reality we‘re slogging through Crap Creek, searching for nuggets of truth to bring to you, the people.

Because there is a difference between information and news.

Musk would like you to believe that difference doesn’t exist — that every bit of information someone puts online is news — equally worthy of consideration. That him going to the border or talking to Trump is full-picture truth, on par with what a journalist does.

And because we in the media have done a poor job of explaining the difference between information and news, people don’t see the actual skill set that keeps dung-logic from contaminating democracy.

I’ll give you a nonpolitical example. I’ve covered many police shootings, but the first was that of a Black man shot by two officers. The official line was that the man was lunging at the police with a knife and they’d had no choice but to fire to protect their lives.

I’m no genius and I’m no saint, but I know how to use a measuring tape. So I went to the street where the shooting happened and checked the distance between where police were and where the man was when he died.

It was not close, folks. Definitely not lunging close.

I could have put that information online all day long with no effect, other than to stir up some conspiracy theories.

But the subsequent news stories I did — with the help of the beautiful machine that is a newspaper, with its editors, copy editors, photographers and so many more — ultimately uncovered video that police had tried to suppress, and led to reforms, the officers leaving the force and a new chief coming in.

That’s plumber journalism — the know-how of the machine to discover the “unknown unknowns” (to steal a phrase from former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld) and pull them out of the poop for all to see and judge.

You can’t internet-research your way to every truth. You have to talk to people, knock on physical and metaphorical doors, pull records and have editors who let you run around on quests that are esoteric until they’re not — until the unknown unknowns, the holy-moly facts that we didn’t even realize were hidden, are fully known.

So ultimately, the political journalists are right, but terrible at explaining why.

Every politician should have to talk to media — with Harris and Tim Walz first in line. Not because we are gatekeepers or smarter than anyone else.

We are just trained handlers of info-poop, so you don’t have to be.