The media hasn’t known what to do for the past three weeks. Ever since Joe Biden outmaneuvered members of his own party and folded his endorsement of Kamala Harris into his withdrawal announcement, it has all been positive forward momentum for the Harris campaign, and now the Harris-Walz campaign. The campaign is raising money like crazy, Harris’s choice of Walz as her running mate was embraced across the Democratic Party spectrum and all of Harris’s campaign stops and rallies are getting huge numbers. Enthusiasm is off the charts, the campaign has signed up thousands of volunteers and, perhaps best of all, it’s completely thrown off Donald Trump and JD Vance. But the media needs a conflict, they need something to hold over Kamala Harris’s head. They’ve settled on “why isn’t VP Harris giving interviews?!?” From Politico:

Introducing Tim Walz gave the campaign millions in free media: The raucous crowd inside the arena in Philadelphia ate it up. And so did the cable networks, three of which carried the event live and uninterrupted for roughly 80 minutes, starting with another strong and closely watched speech from Pennsylvania Gov. JOSH SHAPIRO, the runner up for Harris’ vice president nod. The free publicity — or “earned media,” as operatives call it — is worth millions, and it was reminiscent of the way cable networks carried countless hours of then-candidate DONALD TRUMP’s campaign rallies in 2016.

Trump isn’t getting that kind of free media anymore: Eight years later, things have changed. Trump, now making his third run for the White House, is delivering his well-worn routine at rallies that only sporadically get live network coverage (the “Right Side Broadcasting” YouTube channel doesn’t count). Now, Harris is the new, exciting thing in the race, her rallies delivering left-leaning MSNBC some of its highest ratings in weeks. And preliminary numbers showed that Tuesday’s rally brought the network an audience that was more than double its four-week norm in the 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. hours.

Kamala isn’t doing interviews right now: The Harris camp is hoping to ride the wave as long as it can. So there is little worry about the candidate avoiding something else that has long been required of presidential nominees: taking questions from the press. While some reporters and columnists have started to grumble about that, JD VANCE, Trump’s running mate who is bracketing Harris and Walz on the road this week, tried on Wednesday to draw more attention to the matter.

Her last interview was defending President Biden in June: On June 27, she appeared on CNN and spoke one-on-one with anchor ANDERSON COOPER less than an hour after Biden’s disastrous debate performance, acknowledging that “it was a slow start” but confidently suggesting that the country should assess his performance in the office over three and a half years, not “90 minutes on a debate stage.”… Harris’ determined on-air defense of Biden three years later — which she came up with independent of the campaign team — offered a template Biden and others would use to try to stop the political bleeding. While Biden’s closest aides also viewed that interview as a true show of loyalty, some in Harris’ orbit saw her confident and forceful responses to Cooper as proof of how far she’s come.

Skepticism: Ever since Biden passed Harris the baton, news organizations have been pushing the vice president’s team for a sit-down interview. According to two people familiar with the campaign’s thinking, there are ongoing discussions about a joint interview with Harris and Walz prior to the convention, which begins on Aug. 19 in Chicago. But on the whole, Harris’ top communications aides are deeply skeptical, as Biden’s inner circle was, that doing big interviews with major TV networks or national newspapers offer much real upside when it comes to reaching swing voters. One longtime Harris ally suggested to West Wing Playbook that Harris could hold off on big interviews until after Labor Day. “There’s really no need,” the person said. “The voters that she needs are at the local level. They’re not reading the national press.”

[From Politico]

There’s more at Politico – even the suggestion that Harris is dependent on a Teleprompter, because airhead women, amirite – but the broad strokes are here. Kamala’s people don’t see an upside and I don’t blame them. She’s always gotten an exceptionally raw deal in the mainstream political press, and she just watched what those same people did to Joe Biden. I would say “f–k ‘em forever and let them die mad” but I know she won’t. She and Tim Walz will probably do an interview together before the convention and she’ll do some TV interviews in the fall. But just so we’re clear… this is a controversy being created by the media, and the longer Harris holds off on “giving an interview,” the ruder and more unpleasant these people will get.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.