When is Kamala Harris going to sit down for an in-depth interview?

That seems to be a pressing question among many in the media and, especially, among supporters of former President Donald Trump and even Trump himself.

“She’s not smart enough to do a news conference,” the former president has said.

Actually, one could argue that she’s too smart to do one.

Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president when Joe Biden announced on July 21 that he would not seek a second term. In the 24 days since, Harris has jetted around the country holding rallies and energizing what had been a stagnant Democratic base. She has spoken to adoring crowds who cheer her every syllable.

But she hasn’t held a formal press conference or sat down with a major network or cable news show. No “60 Minutes,” no “Meet the Press,” no CNN, no nothing.

And why should she, at least at this time? Her polling numbers continue to climb. Donations for her campaign are pouring in. Media coverage has been mostly positive. And what once presumed to be a runaway victory for Trump in November has now turned into what appears to be a dead heat.

With so much going her way, Harris’ decision to hold off on any major interviews is prudent — at least for the moment.

The Democratic National Convention is next week, where Harris will give her much-anticipated nomination speech where she will lay out her presidential agenda.

In no way is this a defense of Harris for not facing tough questions from the media, but the smart move is to set the narrative at the convention — and then consider a major interview or press conference. Harris has already said she plans on giving an interview by the end of the month.

But as The Associated Press’ David Bauder writes, “Given that modern presidential campaigns are essentially marketing operations, Harris’ stance is not surprising. For the teams behind candidates, ‘the goal is to control the message as much as possible,’ said Kevin Madden, a Republican communications strategist who was senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012.”

Bauder adds, “Interviews and news conferences take that control away. Candidates are at the mercy of questions that journalists raise — even if they try to change the subject. News outlets decide which answers are newsworthy and will be sliced and diced into soundbites that rocket around social networks, frequently devoid of the context in which they were uttered.”

The New York Times’ Michael M. Grynbaum wrote, “Some political strategists say Ms. Harris is doing exactly what she should be doing. Her campaign rallies have been widely covered, and a kickoff event on Tuesday with her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, was watched live by nearly eight million people on cable news. Big interviews, early on in a candidacy, also carry big risks: witness Sarah Palin’s fiasco with Katie Couric.”

In fact, longtime Democratic adviser and strategist James Carville told Grynbaum, “Where is it written that you have to sit down for a press interview?”

For now, Harris is getting out the message she wants, in the way she wants to get it out.

In a piece for The Daily Beast, David Rothkopf wrote, “You have seen so-called pundits pick up on the silly assertions of JD Vance that Harris is not speaking to the media even though she has been on constant public display ever since her candidacy began. She has given many addresses during that time, she has spoken to the press frequently — as her opponent has been hunkered down doing precious little except posting nutty conspiracy theories on social media, lying at a rate worthy of an Olympic medal during one interview with a friendly journalist, and ranting about things that did not happen with people who did not do them.”

Rothkopf added, “In every speech she has given she talks about principles and policies. About guaranteeing women bodily autonomy. About reducing gun violence. About lowering the costs of drugs and stopping corporate price gouging. About defending voting rights and democracy. About fairer taxes. About defending ourselves against our enemies worldwide. About preserving our alliances. About the need for an immediate ceasefire and the return of the hostages in the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”

Eventually, Harris will have to sit down for a one-on-one interview or press conference.

Or does she?

So far, not doing so hasn’t hurt her.

In a column for The Washington Post, Jim Geraghty wrote, “Republican primary voters didn’t punish Trump for skipping the debates and sticking to friendly interviewers. The grumbling about Biden’s inaccessibility never turned into a serious headache for this administration. Few people outside of the conservative press are griping loudly about Harris’s unavailability. Why isn’t the Democratic nominee doing interviews or news conferences? Because not enough people want her to — and, so far, it’s working.”

Talking Musk and Trump

Is anyone still trying to get rid of the awful aftertaste of Monday night’s Elon Musk-Donald Trump lovefest on X? During a more than two-hour conversation (that started 45 minutes late because of technical problems), Trump spewed a bunch of lies and outrageous statements while Musk either said “yeah … yeah … yeah …” or echoed and doubled down on what Trump said.

CNN’s Daniel Dale reported that Trump made at least 20 false claims during the conversation with Musk. This includes statements about immigration, the climate and Trump’s old standby — that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Dale wrote, “Most of the falsehoods uttered by the Republican presidential nominee were claims that have been repeatedly debunked before, some of them for years.”

With Trump reeling off a medley of his greatest hits, who actually was listening to a two-hour conversation on X on a weeknight?

The Washington Post’s Leigh Ann Caldwell and Marianna Sotomayor wrote, “Trump’s conversation with Musk had more than a million live listeners on X. But several Republican operatives, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, told us that it was also likely to help him reach a specific pro-Trump group: young White men.”

Young white men were a big part of Trump’s base when he defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. But in 2020, a good chunk of those voters either switched over to Joe Biden or didn’t vote at all. Now Trump is trying to woo them back.

The Post wrote, “One way he’s trying to do that is by talking to influencers who are hugely popular among UFC-watching, video-game playing, hard seltzer-drinking men under 45 who don’t usually vote.”

As far as the message is concerned, it would be easy, although dangerous, to dismiss the conversation between Trump and Musk as just two guys feeding off one another with a bunch of ridiculous theories that nobody really takes seriously.

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump wrote, “Highfalutin descriptors not withstanding, that conversation was not an address to the nation. It was two ideological allies touring the right-wing rhetorical bubble and, like new best friends in fourth grade, scrambling over each other to point out their favorite parts.”

Bump added, “Over the course of the conversation, there were countless misrepresentations and dishonesties, the background noise of the Trumpian rhetorical space. But this — and the sort of hagiographic self-policing engaged in by people like (Fox News’ Greg) Gutfeld — is why Trump both has a consistent base of support and why it never seems to get any bigger. There are rules and boundaries to the way in which the right approaches the world, and apostates rarely work their way inside that bubble. This is why the ‘weird’ disparagement has gotten traction: To those outside the bubble, the verbiage and focal points and self-aggrandizement and victimhood are hard to understand.”

The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel wrote, “It did offer a glimpse into something real and illuminating: In eschewing the adversarial interview, Musk and Trump may have re-created the kind of behind-closed-doors conversation that is all too common among certain types of billionaires and other elites. What is remarkable about these conversations isn’t the subject matter itself, but how vapid, predictable, and sycophantic the back-and-forth becomes.”

Misleading numbers

The official X account posted a tweet on Tuesday that said, “Between 7:47 PM and 10:47 PM ET, President Donald Trump’s Space post received 73 million views. During the same period, there were 4 million posts about Elon Musk and President Trump’s conversation on 𝕏, generating a total of 998 million views.”

Former New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo tweeted, “crazy how many people are conflating views with viewers. Neither 1/5th of all Americans nor 1/8 of all humans attended this event.”

At one point late in the conversation, Trump said “like 60 million or something” were listening to the conversation.

The actual number at the time was more like 1.1 million. More will listen to recorded versions of the conversation, but certainly not one-fifth of the country.

To print or not to print

Republican vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance, left, and Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump, shake hands at a campaign rally in Atlanta on Aug. 3. (AP Photo/Ben Gray)

So at least three news outlets — The New York Times, The Washington Post and Politico — were sent leaked confidential material from inside the Trump campaign, but so far have not published any details of what they received. The material is believed to have included some of the vetting that the campaign did on Trump’s running mate, JD Vance.

The Associated Press’ David Bauder writes, “Their decisions stand in marked contrast to the 2016 presidential campaign, when a Russian hack exposed emails to and from Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta. The website Wikileaks published a trove of these embarrassing missives, and mainstream news organizations covered them avidly.”

It’s not known who leaked the materials. The FBI is investigating. The Trump campaign is saying it was hacked, and that Iranians were behind it. Bauder wrote, “ While the campaign provided no evidence for the claim, it came a day after a Microsoft report detailed an effort by an Iranian military intelligence unit to compromise the email account of a former senior advisor to a presidential campaign. The report did not specify which campaign.”

The Washington Post’s Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi wrote, “The decision for newsrooms to not publish the Vance materials — a compilation of publicly available records and statements, including Vance’s past criticisms of Trump — appeared to be more straightforward because they also didn’t reach a high level of public interest.”

Check out the Post and Bauder stories for more details.

Ratings gold

I wrote earlier this week that the Olympic TV ratings were expected to be pretty good. Turns out, they were pretty great.

The final numbers are in and the Paris Games averaged 30.6 million viewers on the various NBC platforms. That is a massive 82% jump over the 2021 Tokyo Games. Granted, those 2021 Games were a bit off-kilter, having been delayed by a year because of COVID-19. And, it should be noted, the 2021 Games were among the lowest-rated Summer Olympics ever.

Still, this summer’s Olympics are a huge success for NBC. The Games also provided what is called a “halo effect,” meaning that the Games helped boost the ratings of such programs as the “Today” show and the “NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt.” While no official numbers were announced, NBC’s streaming service, Peacock, also had a jump in subscriptions.

The really good news for NBC is that the next Summer Olympics will be held in Los Angeles in 2028. With the games here in the U.S. and no major time zone differences to work around, NBC could see even more viewers.

Turn this car around!

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins told a funny story on Stephen Colbert’s CBS late-night show about the day President Joe Biden announced on X that he was dropping out of the race for president. It was a Sunday and Collins was on her way to Brooklyn to meet a friend. That’s when she saw Biden’s tweet.

She told the Uber driver to turn around and take her back home, where she grabbed her CNN badge and a blazer. She got back into the Uber to head to CNN and put in a call to Donald Trump to get his reaction.

Collins told Colbert that she didn’t have her headphones, so she put the call on speaker so she could take notes. And the Uber driver heard her talking to the former president.

Collins said, “… Trump’s voice is like booming through. He knows why I’m calling and what quotes I wanted. The Uber driver is turning around. He’s so confused. He’s looking at me, he’s looking at my phone. He’s like, ‘Is that whose voice I think that is?’ And I just sprinted out of the Uber. And eight hours later when we got off air, I checked the app to make sure I tipped him.”

Here’s the video of Collins’ story.

Change the date

MTV’s signature event — the Video Music Awards — had been scheduled for Sept. 10. But it has been moved to Sept. 11. Why? Most likely to avoid a conflict with the first presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. The date of the first debate between Harris and Trump was just recently announced.

Variety’s Chris Willman wrote, “MTV did not outrightly cite the competing debate in its announcement about the show being bumped, but the network made it unofficially clear that it has a history of encouraging civic engagement and did not want to stand in the way of viewers becoming educated about what’s at stake in a presidential election. Ratings, of course, also could have taken a hit, given the sudden surge of interest in the Harris campaign among younger demos. (A CNBC poll released Friday shows that Harris currently enjoys a 12-point lead over Trump among voters in the 18-to-34 age group.)”

Media tidbits

• NBC News’ Minyvonne Burke with “Former Kansas police chief formally charged over Marion newspaper raid.”
• The Los Angeles Times’ Meg James with “Paramount begins major layoffs ahead of Skydance merger.”
• Variety’s Chris Willman with “Charles R. Cross, Music Journalist Who Wrote Heralded Kurt Cobain Biography and Edited Seattle’s Alt-Weekly the Rocket, Dies at 67.” And Chase Hutchinson wrote this piece about Cross for The Seattle Times.
• PolitiFact’s Amy Sherman with “Federal appeals court rules in favor of PolitiFact and Meta against Children’s Health Defense.”

Hot type

• The New York Times’ Melena Ryzik profiles the child actor who has turned into a successful grown-up actor: “Haley Joel Osment Sees Contentment.”
• The Ringer’s Dan Moore with “How to Start a Professional Sports Team, Win Games, and Save the Town.”

More resources for journalists

• Lead With Influence is for leaders who manage big responsibilities but have no direct reports.
• Try our dynamic, in-person, five-day workshop for new newsroom managers.
• Get an AI ethics framework for your newsroom. Start here.

Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at tjones@poynter.org.

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