Kamala's strategic blitz pays off

Last Sunday, Politico Playbook tweeted, “After avoiding the media for neigh on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is … still largely avoiding the media. The VP is set for a series of interviews that likely won’t press her on tough issues, even as voters want more specifics.” Hmm. Well, that garbage forecast has been categorically disproven. But the fact that it was ever written crystalizes a key disparity in the coverage of this election.

Last night rounded out an extraordinarily successful week of appearances for Vice President Harris, one which—between her and Governor Walz—included interviews on several podcasts, including Call Her Daddy, All the Smoke, and Smartless, while they also appeared on Fox News Sunday, The View, The Howard Stern Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Anderson Cooper’s podcast, a live TV town hall on Univision and—in keeping with the tradition of presidential hopefuls for the past half-century—60 Minutes.

But sure. She’s avoiding the media. Because nothing telegraphs publicity-aversion like appearing on as many shows as there are days of the week. Also, which outlets of “the media” was she avoiding? The press that kept the “Biden is old” drumbeat going so relentlessly 24/7 as to convince the country that he was unfit? The press that regularly features an astonishingly unqualified, racist, mentally unfit, twice-impeached, disgraced felon as an average candidate? The press whose fact-checking department is satisfied by confirming that, indeed, “child care is child care”? The press that covers Trump’s Eugenics-inspired, bald-faced, dangerous lie about immigrants bringing “bad genes” to the country as Donald Trump illustrating “his obsession with genes”? Yeah, that sounds about right. His fascination with genetics is surely the impetus behind his Hitler-adjacent rhetoric.

Why on earth would Harris spend “neigh on her whole campaign” avoiding the media responsible for that level of distortion? For that man? (And why, for that matter, might she be less than compelled to engage with an outlet that would strive to sound lofty by needlessly dropping the word “neigh” into a tweet? Just…don’t.)   

Look, I understand that legacy media is feeling a bit salty and insecure about its waning relevance. But what’s it going to take for them to cease applying explicit Republican spin to the coverage of this election? Why should it be applauded so enthusiastically when the news delivers the news?

Regardless, Harris took an alternative, bold, strategic route by engaging with channels beyond mainstream political media—likely because she was trying to make her candidacy and the stakes of this election known to undecided, average Americans. 

Political junkies who consume little more than touchstone legacy media are unlikely to be undecided. Simply stated (though this appears to be a very hard pill for some to swallow), independent podcasts, unaffiliated shows, and social media are where the VAST majority of undecided voters consume their information and entertainment. People watching CNN, reading the New York Times, and listening to NPR on the way to work are high-information voters who almost certainly know which candidate has their support. 

With neigh 24 days remaining before the election of our lifetimes, the priority is not to persuade those consumers that they’ve chosen wisely. We don’t need to bring sand to the beach here. The priority has to be convincing the people who AREN’T decided; who have neither exposure to politics nor, in most cases, the desire to be exposed to it.

Call Her Daddy, All the Smoke, and Smartless command large, eclectic audiences and are spectacular means of reaching less-engaged voters, whose participation could actually move the needle in what’s shaping up to be a frightfully close race. And all the haters on the left, who don’t think those shows are sufficiently high-brow, should honestly quit whining and take a seat. Consider the fully weaponized media strategy that the right has been employing for years—one that’s been highly reliant on Trump mouthing off his fallacies and fantasies to isolated cult members via extremist podcasts hosted by people who believe that fact-checking is the purview of communists and childless cat-ladies.

(Fun fact: Trump was on one of those podcasts when he was supposed to be on 60 Minutes, an invitation and 56-year legacy maintained by presidential candidates that he reneged. He then proved why fact-checking is not his jam in demanding an apology from the esteemed show for a question that he alleges Leslie Stahl asked him in 2020. Staying on brand, he’s lying. Terror at being held accountable while flagrantly avoiding delivering the truth to the American public doesn’t strike me as especially presidential.)

Appearing and being heard by listeners of independent media follows the Harris-Walz messaging about being For the People. It speaks to the campaign’s obvious gift at understanding the cultural pulse of the voters they’re hoping to inspire and secure and lift off the couch on November 5th. These shows enable easily-clipped exchanges that have been shared widely on social media this week, swilling around and creating a ripple effect of exposure. And, not for nothing, Kamala and Coach are both phenomenal guests who thrive in conversational environments—because they are relatable, genuine, magnetic human beings. A refreshing amount of each of their interviews was spent laughing and expressing optimism for the country. 

Rather than embrace the impressive whirlwind of interviews (after weeks of bemoaning that Kamala was evading them), mainstream media cannot handle being slighted in favor of the “fringe” press and are covering it as though mainstream media itself was on the ballot. You know what? Mainstream media is on the ballot. Because if Trump wins and launches his terrifying Project 2025 blueprint, there will be no more free press to speak of. We all have skin in the game here.

As a result of her savvy choices, Kamala Harris has reached more people and a far more diverse range of voters this week than if she had appeared on CNN two dozen times and spoken to (more or less) the same decided audience each time.

Maybe if the media treated the moment we’re in with just a tad more responsibility and focused on issues that matter, rather than allowing themselves to become tools of rightwing bias, we wouldn’t need alternative media outlets to pick up the slack. But the public has been forced to endure years and years and years of the press Both Sides-ing the news and scrubbing it to consistently pretend that Trump’s anti-democratic behavior is just politics as usual. 

Audiences have been assaulted by nearly a decade of twisted coverage. Younger voters, who have never regarded mainstream media as fonts of objective reality, have little tolerance for being lectured by slick political snobs. And, thanks to fresh, non-traditional sources (like some of those included in this recent media lollapalooza), those voters are much more savvy to the reality that THERE ARE NOT VERY FINE PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES OF EVERY ISSUE. But revealing as much has required progressive independent media sources to step in and draw attention to the false equivalency.

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Take, for example, the week after Judge Chutkan unsealed Jack Smith’s bombshell filing that filled in multiple details confirming Trump’s engagement in the January 6th insurrection, including revelations about his sociopathic ambivalence about the survival of his own vice-president. Our top five newspapers mentioned it in a total of 26 stories, with just 9 of them appearing on A1. By contrast, when the story broke about Hillary’s emails, over 100 stories referenced and hypothesized about it, with 54 splashing theories across front pages across the nation.

Make it make sense.

Of course, that’s just one among untold examples of corporate, traditional media placing undue emphasis on the wrong subject. Given how long this has been an issue, however, public confidence in those sources has collapsed. Headlines from what were once the most reputable sources of information are now met with robust skepticism. Social media accounts have been launched specifically to tally and expose MSM’s bullshit framing or senseless attempts at Gotcha journalism.    

The tide is turning. Donald Trump has long been media catnip. But slow-motion car crashes, though initially impossible to look away from, get boring. After multiple explosions by the hand of the same driver, viewers stop caring about the collisions and casualties—or, in Trump’s case, stop caring about offensive, rampant lies and abhorrent comments against fellow Americans.

As Kamala Harris and her campaign recognized, we don’t need to use mainstream media as our delivery mechanism. It doesn’t have to be that way. This is why we saw such a unique line-up for this bold and inspiring media blitz. As one who has been privileged enough to be a part of the burgeoning independent media ecosystem from the left (and, it should be noted, with absolutely no objectivity), I applaud and approve her message.