The Kamala interview was a bust — for everyone involved

CNN was the lucky winner of the first sit-down media interview with Vice President Kamala Harris since she was pushed to the top of the ticket nearly forty days ago and, well, it didn’t go great.

It was not a particularly long interview. Internet rumors suggested it would be about eighteen minutes in totality and that it had been pre-recorded, which implied edits. While the interview was a bit longer than that and Dana Bash confirmed nothing was cut, we still got only about sixteen minutes of speaking time from Kamala. This was made more obvious by CNN’s decision to stretch it like pizza dough to fit an hour-long broadcast. They opened with a nearly five-minute teaser video that came across like an ad for the Harris campaign, with Bash calling the interview a “watershed moment” in the election. Throughout the hour they took several commercial breaks, teased unaired portions of the interview and aired other pre-packaged videos. CNN should have demanded more time from Kamala and when they didn’t get it, they should have aired the interview in its entirety at one time so viewers could easily recognize how strict the campaign was on access to the candidate. A bolder network would have done so.

Dana Bash’s initial questioning of Kamala was not wholly offensive; she asked Kamala what she would do on day one as president, about the massive shifts in her policy positions since 2019, about the current state of the economy and voters’ feelings that it was better under Trump, why she hasn’t accomplished in the past three and a half years the things she says she wants to accomplish in the next four and if she stands by her positive assessment of President Joe Biden after his debate against Trump. She also asked Walz about his misrepresentation of his service record and his wife’s fertility treatments.

But there were so many missed opportunities for follow-ups. Kamala claimed she had changed her position on fracking between 2019 and 2020, that she had “made clear” on the vice presidential debate stage in 2020 where she stood on the issue. In reality, she shared Biden’s position during the debate, not her own. “Joe Biden will not end fracking. He has been very clear about that,” she said at the time. Bash did not press her on how she managed to go from thinking illegal immigration should be decriminalized and that ICE is comparable to the KKK to thinking we should enforce our nation’s border laws. Bash did not point out that, when asked if Bidenomics was a success, Kamala did not specifically say that it was.

Her attempts to ask tough questions of Walz similarly fell flat. She reduced Walz’s misstatements about his military record to one moment when he said he carried weapons in war; he also, though, continues to claim the wrong rank and has been introduced by others numerous times without correction as a combat veteran. Bash let Walz off easy when he explained it away as being an emotional guy who sometimes used “bad grammar.” Walz claimed that people he has served with have vouched for him, but plenty of his fellow service-members also criticized him and called him out for abandoning their unit ahead of a deployment.

Finally, Bash decided to spend the last few minutes of her already short interview playing footsie. She brought up a clip of Tim Walz’s son, Gus — “a star was born” — cheering for him at the convention and asked the governor to react to it. She referred to an “iconic photo” of Kamala’s grandniece watching her speak at the convention and asked Kamala what it meant to her. It was essentially a journalistic apology to the candidates for any tough questions she had asked earlier.

Aesthetically, the interview was a complete mess. The shot location was drab and looked like an office board room. Kamala was tucked in the back of the shot with Bash in the foreground, which made Kamala look small and insignificant. When the camera zoomed into Kamala’s face, you could see Bash shuffling her papers just above the chyron. The lighting washed everyone out (and it didn’t help that the warm-toned Harris chose a slate gray suit). Kamala had a water cup sitting directly under her chair in the center of the shot.

After the interview, CNN did its typical analysis. They had two panels during the next hour of programming, both of which had four liberal commentators facing off against one conservative. If you include host Abby Phillip — which you should, since she called Harris a “homework doer,” despite past staffers telling Politico she unequivocally did not do her homework — it was six against one.

For the Harris campaign, this was certainly by design. Bash was a great choice to attempt to give the interview legitimacy as she has the veneer of objectivity and is coming off a good performance at the presidential debate. But they knew Bash would never truly hold Kamala accountable. That’s just not the way it goes between Democrats and CNN.