October 17, 2024
On Vice President Harris' Fox News interview...
I just finished watching Vice President Harris’ Fox News interview with Brett Baier and I’m of two minds about it.
Brett Baier asked a number of reasonable questions, some of which Harris answered and some of which she didn’t. Those latter moments weren’t great, particularly her immigration answers and her dodge about when she sensed a decline in President Biden.
Brett Baier could have turned down the antagonism more than just a skosh. Should the press be adversarial? Absolutely. In some instances, he was appropriately so. But in others, he was interrupting her before she was a sentence into her answer. Additionally, when Harris referenced former President Trump’s “enemy from within” line, Baier cut to footage of Trump denying he ever said it, as if that cleared up the matter. It was strange to the point of being a non sequitur. I’ll say the same thing about this that I said about CBS altering its “60 Minutes” interview transcripts: Why? What purpose does this serve except to muddy the waters and sow distrust in the news?
On balance, I’d say the interview was a neutral to minor plus for Harris. The whole point of Fox (and MSNBC) shows like The Ingraham Angle, The Faulkner Focus, and The Hannity Hoedown is to cast the other side as detached, dangerous caricatures you could never countenance voting for. Even if Harris didn’t come off perfectly — and she didn’t — she didn’t live down to the Fox News stereotype of her either. That’s not nothing. We’ll see if it gets her anything.