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Press Failure Inflates the Debate

Is there a debate tonight? About what?


Press Failure Inflates the Debate

Coverage of the Harris campaign is biased. Worse than that, it’s malpractice.


By William McGurn, WSJ

Sept. 9, 2024 5:16 pm ET


Presidential debates typically don’t determine the outcomes of elections, notwithstanding the large television audiences they draw and the dramatic moments they produce. But Tuesday night’s dustup between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris may be different.


Press failure has inflated it into the seminal event of the Trump-Harris race. Because reporters haven’t insisted that Ms. Harris answer basic questions, the debate, moderated by ABC News, may provide the only moment in the 2024 election when Americans get to see how Ms. Harris performs under pressure.


This failure would be appalling at any time, but the circumstances of Ms. Harris’s campaign turn simple media bias into journalistic malpractice. The vice president secured the top slot on the Democratic ticket without having to contest a single primary—and therefore without having to lay out and defend her record. This leaves her largely unknown to American voters, a situation Ms. Harris is now exploiting to reinvent herself as a moderate challenger rather than a woke incumbent.


In addition, Ms. Harris is a mother lode of unanswered questions on most of the issues that once defined her. This includes her previous support for everything from defunding the police and banning plastic straws to getting rid of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and starting from “scratch,” stances she now apparently disavows.


An appearance by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) on ABC’s “This Week” in August shows how the press lets her off the hook. When Mr. Cotton brought up Ms. Harris’s support for eliminating private health insurance, which the Medicare for All policy she espoused in 2019 would do, host Jonathan Karl interjected that Ms. Harris has said she no longer holds that position. Mr. Cotton pushed back. “She has not said that,” he correctly pointed out. “Anonymous aides,” he said, may have said that she no longer holds the position she once did, but we haven’t heard it from the candidate herself.


Ditto the big CNN interview, for which Ms. Harris brought along running mate Tim Walz to cut in to the time she would have to take questions. Moderator Dana Bash did make a show of asking why Ms. Harris flipped on fracking. But she wasn’t pressed on her biggest non-answer of the evening—“My values have not changed.”


It’s unlikely Ms. Bash or CNN would accept such an evasion from Mr. Trump or his running mate, JD Vance. When Mr. Vance did his own interview with Ms. Bash, she rightly grilled him on abortion and comments he made about Mr. Walz’s characterization of his service in the Minnesota National Guard. But it’s worth watching the two interviews to see the very different tones Ms. Bash took toward Mr. Vance and Ms. Harris.


In short, Ms. Harris is getting a pass. Bad enough that 56 days from the election, she still isn’t giving interviews or holding news conferences. The far greater scandal is that a free press isn’t demanding that she do so.


It’s hard to fault Ms. Harris. Her strategy is a sign that she knows her liabilities. Her campaign is trying to get through the next eight weeks avoiding events where she might have to answer an unscripted question or explain details of, say, inflation. Team Harris knows they don’t go very well for her.


Take the recent rollout of her economic platform, most notable for her call for a federal ban on “price gouging.” Even the Washington Post called her plan full of “populist gimmicks.” And former Obama administration economist Jason Furman told the New York Times that it is “not sensible policy.” Message taken: Better to stick to fuzzy, feel-good themes like “joy” or to call Mr. Trump a felon.


It isn’t the first time a Democratic presidential candidate has benefited from a domesticated press. One reason Ms. Harris is her party’s nominee is that the press covered up President Biden’s mental decline. By the time the June 27 debate with Mr. Trump exposed Mr. Biden’s condition for all the American people to see, it was too late for primaries. It was much the same in 2020, when the New York Post broke the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop three weeks before the election. Because the computer contained evidence of Hunter’s sleazy overseas business dealings while his dad was vice president, the press buried it.


Today the received wisdom is that sooner or later Ms. Harris will have to give interviews and press conferences like a normal candidate. Perhaps. But she has a decent shot at winning the White House because her campaign is running out the clock before anyone can ask her a tough question.


On Tuesday night at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump will have at it for 90 minutes. Ironically the low expectations for Ms. Harris may be an advantage. All she has to do is not humiliate herself and her performance will be hailed as a triumph.


If the press corps did its job, we’d all know more of what we need to know about Kamala Harris and what kind of president she’d make. But because it won’t, it’s all on Donald Trump to do that job himself.

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