I have no idea what viewers made of CNN’s big interview with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz last week. I’m guessing both sides at the table counted it as a minor victory, given all the viewers and clicks it generated.
By Matt Bai
If we journalists are actually interested in revealing things about our candidates that enlighten voters and ennoble the process, then it’s time to completely rethink the questions we ask.
That’s not a slam on CNN, which is a vital part of the news landscape, or on anchor Dana Bash, whom I’ve known since we each covered our first presidential campaign 24 years ago; she has always been a serious reporter. This is more about the flawed way that we as an industry approach our conversations with presidents and presidential candidates.
Broadly speaking, there are a few kinds of interviews that a journalist might conduct with someone like Harris. The most prevalent by far, which is what CNN was up to, is what I’d call the institutional interview. It’s not so much about the agenda of any specific journalist — or the interests of the audience, for that matter — as it is about bringing attention to the network or newspaper that has managed to secure it.
You see, as soon as any news outlet manages to nail down an “exclusive” interview like this one (they are, inevitably, described that way), a team of reporters and editors and researchers sets about coming up with a list of highly scripted questions, the primary goal being to elicit some kind of un-canned response that will create headlines — and no small amount of envy — in the rest of the media.
It has been this way for decades. I remember being shocked to find out, when I landed my first presidential interview as a young reporter at Newsweek in the late 1990s (it was a big magazine, ask your parents), that I would not get to conduct the interview as I normally would, in the manner of an actual conversation. My job was to go into the Oval Office and read from a preapproved list of questions; I might as well have been the guy in the subway who tells you to stand clear of the closing doors.
News organizations tend to think about these interviews in the same way Hollywood thinks about a formulaic sitcom; the first episode is about this, then the second episode is about that, and so on until you run out of time in the season. The questions cover a bunch of topics and are related only in the sense that they are trying to trap the candidate into admitting some kind of inconsistency, which is the main theme of the show.
Increasingly, interviews like this are structured with an ear toward social media, where mobs of ideologically charged critics on either side are always ready to whine about the question that wasn’t asked or the lie that wasn’t immediately called out. Networks and news sites feel an added pressure to show how tough and prosecutorial they can be, in an effort to stave off tweets from a bunch of random people who will never be placated in any event.
All of which is why, in this CNN interview, for example, Bash started out by asking Harris about why she changed her position on fracking and then quickly moved on to her reversal on decriminalizing illegal immigration. Harris, naturally, danced around these questions, which were a waste of everyone’s time, because voters with even the most cursory understanding of politics already knew the answers; it turns out that candidates often tailor their positions to the moment because they like to win. That’s called politics.
If you write political profiles, however, as I did for magazines for many years — or if you’re the kind of long-form television raconteur we really don’t have anymore, like a Larry King or a Charlie Rose — then you try to take a more thoughtful approach. These kinds of interviews aren’t at all like episodic television — they’re more like a feature film, where a progression of questions tells a story, from beginning to end. And you arrive at the story you’re trying to tell not by convening a committee of reporters and editors to pore over a candidate’s past statements, but by stepping back at the outset and asking yourself the most fundamental journalistic question there is.
What do we actually not know about this person that we’d like to know? What am I genuinely curious to learn?
Because what you find, if you do a lot of lengthy interviews with guarded politicians, is that most of them will actually tell you things if you’re truly trying to understand what it’s like in their shoes. If all you’re doing is ticking off a bunch of loaded questions, then bland deflections are all you get.
Had I been doing the interview with Harris (let’s leave Walz aside because that should have been a separate undertaking), I think I would have skipped specific questions about this policy or that one. Harris isn’t running on a policy agenda, and when pressed on it, she’s guaranteed to lapse into maddening generalities.
Instead, I’d have delved more deeply into two topics. I’d have started with something CNN only got to later and much too briefly, which is what it has been like to actually be Harris for the past several weeks. What might her recounting of her bizarre journey — in a way that’s genuine and not crammed into a question or two — reveal about who she really is and how she handles the unexpected?
And then I’d have pivoted to her main vulnerability as a politician: this reputation, well-earned, for speaking about policy in mashups of incoherent clichés. Instead of trying to trap her in some kind of rhetorical box, I’d have asked her directly — which probably no one ever has — why she sometimes seems reluctant to speak without a script.
What goes through her mind at moments when she seems to get caught in a tangle of phraseology? Does she understand why some people would doubt her grasp of policy? And does she think it’s unfair?
I’d genuinely like to know if Harris is at all introspective about these things. I think a lot of voters would, too.
The other thing you learn as an interviewer is that presidential candidates, if they know what they’re doing, come to the table with their own agendas. I’ve always been attuned to the phrase that a candidate manages to work into every answer or the pivot they keep trying to make. It tells you where the candidate thinks he or she has a winning argument, or maybe a problem that has to be fixed.
In 2008, John McCain showed up to our hour-long interview on foreign policy with a prebuttal that he then delivered for the first 15 minutes, like a filibuster. I learned all about what was making him angry at that moment without so much as asking a question.
On this, Harris failed just as much as the network did — and if I were a Democratic operative, that would worry me. She seemed intent only on not blowing up, which she achieved. Her big surprise was to say, in response to a question, that she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet. Someone get the defibrillator.
Did Harris have any argument she wanted to make sure you heard? Was there any point of which she burned to persuade anyone? Apparently not. Her advisers seemingly let her come to the table with no plan other than to evade the traps, which hints at either an alarming lack of political sophistication or, worse, a lack of something to say.
Perhaps the problem here, for both journalists and candidates, is that we’ve gotten so out of practice. There was a time not long ago, believe it or not, when presidential candidates felt compelled to make their cases in long, involved interviews. In 2004, John F. Kerry spent an acutely uncomfortable four hours, give or take, talking with me for a New York Times Magazine profile. I’m pretty confident that will never happen again — and that’s not because Kerry ended up regretting our interviews after Republicans took a fairly innocuous statement he made about terrorism and turned it into a TV ad.
No, it’s because, for both the candidates and the news media, the only interviews worth doing now are the performative kind. Candidates have largely decided, in the digital age, that they can reach all the voters they really need to reach — their voters — by talking to sympathetic media that will seek nothing beyond slogans (and that will amplify those slogans for armies of like-minded social media followers). And traditional journalists have decided that the purpose of a candidate interview is to drum up some controversy and make a big show of how skeptical we are of everything.
Did the media or the Democratic ticket get anything out of this CNN interview? Maybe, if you’re a network looking for hype, or if you’re a candidate who just wants to check the box of having sat for some questions. But I’m pretty sure no one else did, and that’s something we can change, in the weeks ahead, simply by returning to the most basic of journalistic edicts.
Be curious and listen.
