Kamala Harris is going into the metaphorical lion’s den and will be interviewed on Fox News by news anchor Bret Baier. Earlier in the campaign, she rejected a Fox News debate with Donald Trump, to which he had already agreed. Good for her.
The official Democratic Party position has long been to denigrate Fox because it does not follow the pro-Democrat/progressive propaganda mission of the other major networks. Barack Obama said, more than once, that it didn’t qualify as a legitimate news source. The Party has long shown hostility toward Fox News; it formally barred the network from hosting a primary debate in 2020. Hillary Clinton, as the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, had one Fox News interview and that was the last one by a POTUS candidate from her party in the last eight years. President Biden refused to appear on Fox.
Harris gets only a half-Ethics Hero not because hers is an act dictated by crisis. If one has any doubt that internal polls, external polls, and basic vibes show Harris’s cynical, gossamer campaign on a losing flight path, her decision to have an interview with a journalist who might not be planning on voting for her should dispel it.
This is an obvious Hail Mary. “Her willingness to appear on Fox News may aid the perception that she is open to facing tough questions,” writes the Harris-bolstering Times. Sure. She’s open to facing tough questions if there are no alternatives, and there aren’t: she’s tried them all. Risibly, the Times claims that “Harris has appeared across a range of traditional and niche media outlets in recent weeks,” then contradicts itself by listing them:
On Monday, she used interviews with Roland Martin and The Shade Room, an online entertainment publication, to further her pitch to Black voters, arguing that Mr. Trump had engaged in a decades-long pattern of racist behavior. On Tuesday, she is set to record a live interview in Detroit with Charlamagne Tha God, host of the syndicated morning radio show “The Breakfast Club,” which is particularly popular with Black millennials. Last week, she sat for interviews with “The View,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and “The Howard Stern Show.” Ms. Harris sat for a “60 Minutes” interview that aired on CBS last week.
I wonder why they left out Harris’s interview on “Call Her Daddy,” a sex topics podcast….anyway, the one “traditional” media outlet interview turned into a fiasco, with “60 Minutes” revealing itself as just another agent of the Democratic Party and an incompetent one. But here’s how the Times describes Trump’s interview record:
Trump refused to appear on [“60 Minutes] and accused CBS of bias; the network said he had committed to an interview and then reneged. Mr. Trump is a frequent presence on partisan Fox News shows like “Hannity”; he has also kept up a heavy schedule of interviews on podcasts and other alternate media, including a video game celebrity’s streaming page. On Tuesday, he will be interviewed by the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, John Micklethwait, at the Economic Club of Chicago.
Can you say “selective reporting”? Sure you can. Trump submitted to two Presidential debates moderated by obviously biased, Axis reporters. His decision to refuse the “60 Minutes” interview was mandated by the hostility toward J.D. Vance displayed by two CBS moderators in the V.P. debate, and the “60 Minutes” deceptive editing scandal following Harris’s interview completely validated his decision to avoid that snake-pit (for Republicans). The Times conveniently omits Trump’s interview in front of the National Association of Black Journalists, hardly a friendly venue.
If Harris has to try to show she’s able to handle more than soft-ball questions (and she’s whiffed at many of those so far), Bret Baier is a good choice for her. All of the Fox news show hosts are professional and generally fair (MSNBC, in contrast, has no such hosts at all). I assume that the reliably bland Baier will go out of his way to avoid displaying open bias against Harris, after all, he may be looking for a non-Fox job someday. Then again, Baier may be job-hunting sooner rather than later if Fox viewers think he botched a chance to expose Harris’s shallowness. If Harris is as effectively factchecked live like poor, silly Tim Walz was by Shannon Bream during his latest Fox News interview, her gamble may prove disastrous.
Kamala has no other choice, however, if she wants to win the election. At least she has the courage to take it.
Ethics Alarms 
This will be interesting. Although Baier may be “bland,” he’s also smart and highly professional. I fully expect him to be courteous and respectful, but also to not let Harris off the hook if/when she dodges questions.
Presuming that happens (given past performance, how could it not?), the interview will be met with howls of outrage from Dems, who will go into high dudgeon about how biased Fox News is. Yes, segments of it are – Laura Ingraham, Jesse Watters and Sean Hannity all have doppelgangers over at MSNBC and CNN. But although Baier (like his mentor Brit Hume) is relatively conservative in his own views, he’s also extremely fair.
Do you not think he’s bland? Not that there’s anything wrong with that…
He also has an unfortunately shaped head.
“This is an obvious Hail Mary.”
Exactly the first thought that popped into my head when I heard it’d been scheduled.
“She’s open to facing tough questions if there are no alternatives, and there aren’t: she’s tried them all” was a photo-finish second.
PWS
Baier: Harris Interview Will Be Pre-taped With “VERY MINIMAL” Editing
Hmmm….
PWS
It should be taped and viewed with ZERO editing. Fox needs not be part of the problem…be the solution!! If she does a great job, show that. If she crashes and burns, show it. Someone should just give us the unvarnished truth…for once!!!
Kamala has no other choice, however, if she wants to win the election. At least she has the courage to take it.
Cue Lee Corso and a “Not so fast, my friend.”
She doesn’t make any decisions. That’s like saying someone has courage to walk the plank with their hands tied and a saber pin-pricking their back. The decision was made by her handlers. She had no say in the matter. She’s a ventriloquist’s dummy. Unfortunately, they won’t allow her to sit on anyone’s lap while being interviewed.
“Unfortunately, they won’t allow her to sit on anyone’s lap while being interviewed.”
I’m pretty sure she stopped doing that when she left San Francisco.
“I’ll have the word salad.”
What are the chances that Harris/they consider Trump to be succeeding while delivering stream of conscious word salad and thus think that word salad is the correct strategy to parallel him? Personally, I will take dumb and drunk. Though, what if the way she communicates is the way a large portion of people perceive things. She may be Trumps alter ego.
But Trump’s stream of consciousness speech is full of opinions, riffs, ideas—free association doesn’t sound like bluffing and doubletalk, which is what Harris’s word salads are. It’s annoying to organized thinkers, but it has substance buried in there.
I would have chosen Harris Faulkner. She is tough, does not suffer fools gladly and is insulated from the typical rhetoric regarding race and gender. This could help Trump with the woman vote because there will be no claim of misogynistic behavior.
Oh, I’m sure Harris and her team rejected Faulkner for exactly that reason, and she is much, much tougher than Baier.
When you are getting free earned media you should not get to pick the interviewer.
It’s negotiation, though. Fox News wants the ratings and the prestige. Harris wants a chance to look competent.
I still want to see a Faulkner-Gutfeld tag-team interview. I know I will die unfulfilled.
It will be interesting to see how many Dems will break their blood-oath about avoiding Fox News at all costs by watching the interview.
What you don’t mention, Jack is that Bret Baier, to put it mildly, is not a fan of Trump. And he’s said so numerous times. He’s likely the only one at Fox that Harris’ controllers would accept for an interview of her.