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      Harris-Trump debate watched by 67m people, beating pivotal Biden showdown

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      An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a 31% increase from the June debate between Trump and President Joe Biden that eventually led to the president dropping out of the 2024 race.The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.Tuesday’s count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s first face-off in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.There was a marked increase in younger and middle-aged viewers, with 53% more adults aged 18-49 tuning in to see Harris debate Trump than watched Biden do the same, according to Nielsen data.Of the viewers who watched on cable networks, the highest number of viewers were on Fox News, with 9.1 million people tuning in on the channel known for its positive coverage of Trump.Harris was widely seen to have won the debate. A CNN flash poll of debate watchers showed 63% to 37% that Harris had performed better. Prior to the debate, those voters were split 50-50 on who would win. Of the Harris-supporting viewers polled by CNN, 96% said she had done a better job, while 69% of Trump supporting viewers said so.Trump’s campaign publicly claimed victory, but some of his aides privately conceded it was unlikely that he persuaded any undecided voters to break for him, people familiar with the matter told the Guardian.The viewership puts the debate roughly between the Seinfeld (76.3 million) and Friends (52.5 million) series finales.Minutes after it ended, Taylor swift endorsed the Harris-Walz ticket to her 283 million Instagram followers in a post that included a link to the government voter registration website Vote.gov. The site saw almost 338,000 new visitors in the hours that followed, a General Services Administration spokesperson told MSNBC.Swift’s endorsement is likely to be most influential among Americans under 35, since about 30% of that group say they are more likely to vote for someone Swift supports, according to polling conducted for Newsweek. The polling found that 18% of voters say they are “more likely” or “significantly more likely” to vote for a Swift-backed candidate, while 17% say they are less likely.No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although the Harris campaign have asked for one, and the Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice-presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance on 1 October.Tuesday’s debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate set off a series of events that resulted in Biden’s withdrawal from the race.While CNN chose not to correct any misstatements by the candidates during Trump’s debate with Biden in June, ABC instead challenged statements that Trump made about abortion, immigration, the 2020 election and violent crime. More

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      ABC’s debate moderators did what they said was impossible: fact-checking Trump | Margaret Sullivan

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      They said it couldn’t be done. For years, we’ve heard all the reasons – excuses, really – that presidential debates cannot and should not be fact-checked in real time.Countering lies is not the job of the moderators, we were told; it is strictly the role of the candidates themselves. Fact-checking would take up too much time and interrupt the flow of the debate, we were told. And what about impartiality? How could moderators be expected to decide whom to challenge with fact checks?Fact-checking, we were told, was impractical and inappropriate, and simply a very, very bad idea. Yes, even in the age of Donald Trump, who wakes up each day and immediately begins lying about his dreams.But then came Tuesday night’s debate between Trump and Kamala Harris – and that memorable moment when the moderator Linsey Davis of ABC News piped up with just a few words after Trump went into one of his evidence-free rants about babies being executed.“There is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after it’s born,” Davis said in an even tone. It didn’t take a lot of time, it did correct an oft-repeated lie and it did establish something important: the most egregious falsehoods might well be challenged by these moderators. The candidates were put on notice.Davis wasn’t alone in this. Her co-moderator, David Muir – in much the same neutral, polite tone and with much the same admirable brevity – did the same. After Trump made a wild claim about migrants in Ohio eating pets, Muir calmly stated that ABC had pre-checked this one and determined that it wasn’t true. And in another instance, Muir countered Trump’s charges of uncontrolled and rising crime, especially involving migrants, with this: “As you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country.”It was noticed. And largely, though not universally, praised. The moderators also did a good job of returning to questions that had not been answered, and in some cases, pressing for a clear yes or no.Trump’s allies were outraged, naturally, that he wasn’t allowed to fib at will. How terribly unfair, they charged. Why weren’t there equal numbers of fact checks and challenges for Harris, they demanded, never stopping to acknowledge that she had mostly stuck to that crazy little thing called the truth. (A lengthy New York Times listing of questionable statements by both candidates, published after the debate, identified a couple of times that Harris has strayed from reality or misled; but, as expected, there was really no comparison with Trump’s litany of lies.)Trump later posted on social media calling the moderator “hacks”. The debate, he charged, was “THREE ON ONE!”But, as CNN’s Abby Phillip drily observed: “When there is asymmetrical lying, there will be asymmetrical fact-checking.”The post-debate media coverage, in general, was up to its usual tricks of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt. Overall, it too often failed to convey with clarity what had happened in a debate dominated by the cool strength of Harris and the angry, incomprehensible ravings of Trump. Headlines tended to lapse into neutralizing, conventional language like this one in the Washington Post: “Harris crisply attacks Trump, prompting retorts with fiery language.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionNPR, to its credit, noted: “The spotlight should now be on Trump’s incoherence and general lack of any serious grasp on policy.”And even over on Fox News, there were some abnormal glimmers of reality, as when Brit Hume allowed that Trump had “had a bad night”.No doubt, the debate was a win for Harris.And, with the help of ABC’s moderators, a better-than-usual night for the truth.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      The Kamala Harris campaign has Fox News grasping at straws – literally | Margaret Sullivan

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      Watching Fox News these days is like being at open-mic night at a marginal comedy club.Rightwing pundits, like a lineup of amateur comics, are trying out their new material and hoping it kills. So far, not so much.Take Jesse Watters (please). The primetime successor to Tucker Carlson was grasping at straws – yes, literal straws – the other day as he looked for a way to put down Tim Walz. How best to mock the popular Minnesota governor who is Kamala Harris’s running mate?“Women love masculinity and women do not like Tim Walz, so that should just tell you about how masculine Tim Walz is,” Watters said on the roundtable talk show he co-hosts, The Five.With that setup, he tried to prove his point.“The other day you saw him with a vanilla ice-cream shake. Had a straw in it. Again, that tells you everything.”The joke, or whatever it was, didn’t really land. Most people know that Walz is the opposite of a wimp. He’s a famously regular guy – America’s dad – who will use his newfound power to demand that all Americans own jumper cables and know how to use them.The straw-grasping is getting a little desperate these days as Harris and Walz spread their forward-looking message, and as their rivals – the felon and adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance – prove themselves less appealing by the day.“Fox is really feeling the loss of Tucker Carlson right now,” theorized Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters, the progressive media-watchdog non-profit, who watches a lot of rightwing cable news as part of his job.“He was very effective at lifting something from the rightwing fever swamp and making it into a coherent message” that could spread through the conservative ecosystem.Failing Tucker’s contributions to the commonweal, Fox and its pundits are floundering. They keep trying new approaches to replace their well-honed attacks on Biden – his family’s supposed corruption (“Biden crime family”) and his age (“senile”).Over the past week, Fox tried to gin up controversy over Harris’s “code-switching” – the use of a different accent or speaking style when speaking to Black audiences. Fox’s White House correspondent Peter Doocy pressed the question at an official press briefing.“Since when does the vice-president have what sounds like a southern accent?” Doocy demanded. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, dismissed him and moved on after posing a query of her own: “Do you think Americans seriously think this is an important question?”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMaria Bartiromo focused on this “southern accent” scandal on her Fox Business show, using a clip of Harris speaking to an audience in Detroit about how unions have helped win benefits for all Americans, like paid sick leave and a five-day work week, by repeating the phrase: “You’d better thank a union member.”The pro-Trump cable network didn’t help its own cause with that one. “The funny thing about Fox News being mad at Harris for code-switching,” one observer noted on X, “is they had to play the clip of her talking about how great unions are over and over again.” You can’t buy that kind of media exposure.The well-circulated photograph of Tim Walz’s family members wearing pro-Trump T-shirts fizzled, too, though it got a good ride on Fox for a day or two. Soon enough, it became clear that these were mostly distant cousins, a Nebraska branch of the family. Walz’s sister told the Associated Press she didn’t even recognize them. Walz does have an older brother who favors Trump, but most Americans are familiar with family disputes over politics.Gertz told me that Fox pundits were sent reeling by Harris’s ascension and are “very shook by the ‘weird’ narrative” that Tim Walz has popularized. That’s the idea that Trump, Vance and their ilk are deeply strange people – way out of the mainstream with their nasty putdowns of “childless cat ladies” and their outlandish conspiracy theories. It applies all too well to the Fox personalities as well as the politicians they promote.There’s time, of course, for Fox to come up with an effective message. Until something hits, we’re going to see a lot of painful tryouts.The alternative, of course, is obvious: just don’t turn it on.

      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      The mainstream press is failing America – and people are understandably upset | Rebecca Solnit

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      The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      Why are so many Democratic politicians appearing on Fox News?

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      Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transport secretary, introduced himself to Democrats at their convention earlier last month in unusual fashion. “I’m Pete Buttigieg and you might recognize me from Fox News,” he told the crowd in Chicago.The comment drew laughter, but beneath it was a certain truth: in the final two months of the 2024 election, politicians and campaign aides are less siloed in their ideologically aligned media bubbles in an effort to poach potentially persuadable voters.Buttigieg said he is proud to go on conservative outlets to speak on behalf of the Harris-Walz campaign because their arguments and facts might not otherwise be aired to that audience. So too have the Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, and senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, John Fetterman and Chris Coons also dropped in on the network.Meanwhile, Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski has been on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber, and JD Vance on CNN. Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris told CNN she would find a place in her cabinet for a Republican if elected.In an election that is likely to turn on a small number of undecided voters in a handful of swing states, and considering that the Harris-Walz campaign has been on a bus tour of heavily Republican, mainly pro-Trump rural Georgia where there aren’t many votes to get, the cross-border forays into enemy TV territory makes sense.“We have so many hyper-close elections in swing states that even if you only get a point or two that you take away from Republicans and put in your column can be the 10,000 votes that give you that swing state,” said the University of Virginia political analyst Larry Sabato.The same is true for going on a cable news station holding perceived political biases. When Buttigieg goes on Fox News, Sabato says, he is “not just addressing Republicans, but also getting Democrats indebted to him for the unpleasant task he’s performing”.But the media too likes to play the game – albeit for different reasons. The issue of the media, and its perceived political biases, has become a central campaign issue in the US and there is a deep public hostility to journalists. For the more partisan television networks like Fox and MSNBC, there is an advantage to having people from the other side on – as it may somewhat defuse accusations of one-sidedness.It is also a long tradition. Fox News used to have a now-distant show called Hannity & Colmes that was presented by conservative Sean Hannity and liberal Alan Colmes. Typically, Colmes would come off worse – and indeed was often the subject of much mockery.“Both play a game here,” said Sabato. “Fox News chooses people who are quote-unquote Democrats who haven’t been in the game for sometime or who are out of sync with the party, and the same is true with Republicans on CNN. They feel an obligation – if not balanced, then at least a voice to the other side.”The passage of Democrats to Fox may also be entirely pragmatic given the power of the channel. Nielsen Media Research shows Fox News is the highest-rated network in all swing states. According to a recent YouGov poll –54% of Republicans, 22% of Democrats and 28% of independent voters had watched the cable station in the past month.An Axios/Harris 100 Poll also found that Fox News has gained ground this year with more independents and Democrats in terms of trust. Jessica Loker, vice-president of politics at the network, told Bloomberg that the network sees ratings go up when Democrats are on. The Fox News anchor Bret Baier told Axios: “If you build it, they will come.”A Fox News spokesperson confirmed that the outlet has seen, even before the Democratic convention in Chicago, a 41% increase in Democrat guests, excluding strategists, in the year to August.But that comes as politicians are fighting daily battles over media representation, most recently over whether microphones at the ABC-hosted Harris-Trump debate on 10 September would be muted when it is the other person’s turn to speak. Before that, the campaigns were locked in disputes over which network would host and when.“The inner workings of the political process are so much the subject matter, and that includes how the political process interacts with the media,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture. “If they’re talking about microphones, or if it’s a fair place, then they’re not talking about the issues that they should be talking about in a debate, which they may or may not actually talk about that debate.”Moreover, Thompson points out, “the whole debate over doing a presidential debate on ABC or Fox demonstrates how much everyone assumes that each one of these operations are part of a set of established political ideologies.”“The things being debated are newly self-generated parts of how journalism has become so intimately part of the story as opposed to being the medium by which we communicate these two people,” said Thompson.And it is apt to go wrong. Last week, MSNBC’s Ari Melber threatened to sue Lewandowski for lying about him over comments he made over the attempted Trump assassination. Trump is suing ABC News and George Stephanopoulos over the anchor’s assertion that a jury concluded Trump had raped magazine writer E Jean Carroll. So, it seems, even if Democrats are venturing on to hostile territory more and more, the terrain still remains thoroughly part of a battlefield. More

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      Harris’s interview: Democrats swoon while Republicans grimace

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      Democrats lauded it as the perfect pitch; Donald Trump dismissed it as “boring”, while fellow Republicans invoked derogatory terms like “gobbledygook”.Between the two extremes, Kamala Harris appeared to have achieved what she wanted from Thursday’s groundbreaking CNN interview, given along with her running mate, Tim Walz – her first since become the Democratic presidential nominee.Under fierce scrutiny after nearly six weeks of interview radio silence, the vice-president earned lavish praise from the Democratic base while denying Republicans a clear line of attack simply by avoiding major missteps of the type that undid Joe Biden’s candidacy in June’s climactic debate.The performance is also unlikely to shake up a race that has reversed itself since Harris entered it and replaced Biden, flipping a narrow but solid Trump lead into a contest in which she is now firmly ahead.A commentator with AZCentral.com – a news site in the key swing state of Arizona – called the performance “too sane to be great TV”, an implicit comparison with Trump’s frequently ostentatious media appearances.Commenting on her championing of Biden’s record in office, the New York Times noted that “it turns out, Ms Harris is a better salesperson for Mr Biden’s accomplishments and defender of his record than he ever was”.But the highest praise came from Harris’s party supporters.“This interview with Dana Bash is a moment to recognize that it is absolutely under-appreciated that Vice President Harris is running a perfect campaign,” Bill Burton, a former deputy press secretary in Barack Obama’s presidency, posted on X.“She took over a campaign that she did not hire. She added pieces to the team who have made it stronger. She ran a convention that was absolutely electric in its energy. And she stepped up to the biggest speech of her life and achieved at the highest level … She is a true inspiration.”Ed Krassenstein, a pro-Democrat X user with 1m followers, wrote: “Kamala Harris is killing it. She’s showing she is a unifying, non-divisive force … Her poll numbers will go up after this interview.”Another vocal Democratic supporter, Alex Cole, praised Harris for sidestepping a question from the interviewer, Dana Bash, on Trump’s recent comments denigrating her mixed racial identity, which the vice-president dismissed as “the same tired old playbook”.“Kamala isn’t playing by Trump’s or the media’s rules. They can’t lay a hand on her,” Cole wrote. “Trump craves the attention.”Harris’s low-key approach even won the grudging praise of the Republican pollster Frank Luntz when she vowed to enact a bipartisan immigration bill that Trump had pressured his GOP congressional allies into torpedoing.“Harris reminding voters that Trump sunk a bipartisan immigration solution makes him look pretty bad. Smart approach,” Luntz wrote.Predictably, the most forceful attacks came from Trump himself, who began went on the offensive even before the interview was broadcast.On Harris’s response to being pressed on her abandonment of previous leftwing policy positions, Trump wrote: “Her answer rambled incoherently, and declared her ‘values haven’t changed.’ On that I agree, her values haven’t changed.”A related post conjured up Trump’s frequent and bizarre depiction of Harris as a communist, reading simply: “Comrade Kamala: ‘My values have not changed.’”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionUnder a Harris presidency, “America will become a WASTELAND,” Trump wrote, reverting to his habit of using block capitals.He even took issue with the interview’s setting, a Black-owned restaurant in the historic Georgian city of Savannah, suggesting it made Harris look unpresidential.“She was sitting behind that desk – this massive desk – and she didn’t look like a leader to me,” Trump said at a campaign event in Wisconsin. “I’ll be honest, I don’t see her negotiating with President Xi of China. I don’t see her with Kim Jong-un like we did with Kim Jong-un.”Jason Miller, a Trump spokesperson and former presidential assistant, asked why the interview lasted only 27 minutes, well short of the hour CNN had slotted for it in its schedule.“How many minutes of fluff filler did CNN have to run to make up for the ridiculously short interview?” he wrote, asking if the network was forced to “cut some of Kamala’s answers, and that’s why they couldn’t fill the hour?”The rightwing Fox News channel highlighted the mocking responses of conservative commentators to Harris’s comments on the climate crisis, when she extolled her work on the Green New Deal and said the administration was “holding ourselves to deadlines around time”.“Gobbledygook,” posted a conservative commentator, Steve Guest, on X. “The definition of a deadline is ‘the latest time or date by which something should be completed’.”But having promised a presidency that would seek “consensus” and vowed to appoint a Republican to her cabinet, Harris may have noted with quiet satisfaction Trump’s ultimate verdict on her interview: “Boring!”The judgment could have been a tacit admission that Harris’s performance had denied him a clear target as he prepares for a keynote debate with her in two weeks.“On issue after issue, Harris signaled moderation and a gauzy centrism that has been the hallmark of every winning Democratic presidential campaign for decades,” Politico said on its Playbook column. “The interview suggested to us how tough Donald Trump’s job is now – and especially at the Sept. 10 debate.” More

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      Harris and Walz to give first sit-down interview as Democratic ticket on CNN

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      Kamala Harris and Tim Walz will sit for their first interview as the Democratic ticket on Thursday, after weeks of demands from Republicans and members of the media for the nominees to open themselves up to questions.The interview, which will be conducted by CNN anchor Dana Bash from the battleground state of Georgia, is set for a primetime spot on CNN at 9pm ET.Despite a whirlwind of media coverage of the Harris campaign and a surge of support in the six weeks since Joe Biden ended his bid for re-election and endorsed her, the vice-president has yet to do a formal interview or hold a press conference.“There are a lot of questions that have been lingering out there for her to answer as we go into this fall campaign,” David Chalian, CNN’s political director, said after announcing the interview on the network Tuesday. “We have been waiting to see this next important hurdle for Kamala Harris and her campaign to jump,” Chalian added, noting that Harris and Walz successfully rallied the party, raised heaps of money, and pulled off the convention. “All of that is very scripted,” he said. “This is the first time she is going to take questions.”Harris laid out some broad policy agendas at the Democratic national convention last week, promising a middle class tax cut at home and a muscular foreign policy of standing up to Russia and North Korea. In recent weeks, Harris also shared some of the first glimpses into what her policy priorities might look like, including a proposal for $25,000 down-payment support programs for first-time home buyers and a call for cracking down on price-gouging companies.But while her campaign is busy spreading enthusiasm for her nomination, some details have been left scant. There still isn’t a dedicated policy page on the official campaign website and Harris has turned down interview requests, opting instead for less-risky campaign appearances and short conversations with pool reporters.“On the whole, Harris’s top communications aides are deeply skeptical, as Biden’s inner circle was, that doing big interviews with major TV networks or national newspapers offer much real upside when it comes to reaching swing voters,” Politico reported earlier this month, citing two unnamed people close to the campaign. An anonymous source claimed there is little incentive to change course: “She’s getting out exactly the message she wants to get out,” they said.Now, as time ticks down for Harris and Walz, the governor of Minnesota, to make their final appeal to anyone who might still be undecided, their campaign has embraced a slight shift in strategy.Harris and her opponent, Donald Trump, are scheduled to debate each other next month, even as a back-and-forth continues between the campaigns over what rules have been agreed.The dispute has centered on the issue of microphone muting, which Biden’s campaign made a condition of his decision to accept any debates this year. Trump said in a post on Truth Social on Tuesday that the parameters for the 10 September debate would be “the same as the last CNN Debate”, when both candidates’ microphones were muted except when it was their turn to speak.But Harris’s campaign said on Tuesday that specifics for the debate are still being worked out with the host, ABC News. A Harris spokesperson noted: “Both candidates have publicly made clear their willingness to debate with unmuted mics for the duration of the debate to fully allow for substantive exchanges between the candidates – but it appears Donald Trump is letting his handlers overrule him. Sad!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, the Democratic ticket will make good on its promise to do an interview.“Now is the opportunity to hear her ruminate aloud,” Chalian said, “with Dana asking her about her policy positions, her plans for the future, her plans for the country, in an unscripted setting – and, of course, to see the Democratic ticket interacting with each other.”The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story More

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      in Elections

      Edgar Bronfman Jr. Drops Pursuit of Paramount

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      Mr. Bronfman had frantically put a bid together over the last week even as Paramount raised questions about his financing.Edgar Bronfman Jr. abandoned his pursuit of Paramount on Monday, dropping his 11th-hour bid roughly a day before the deadline to submit a final offer for the owner of CBS and MTV.Mr. Bronfman’s decision to suspend his bid all but ensures that Paramount will be acquired by Skydance, an up-and-coming Hollywood studio that has spent most of this year courting, cajoling and cudgeling Paramount into a deal. Skydance reached an $8 billion merger agreement in July, but that deal included a “go shop” window that allowed Paramount to seek other buyers.In a statement, Mr. Bronfman said his bidding group had notified a special committee of Paramount’s board of directors Monday that the group would drop its pursuit, adding that it was “a privilege to have the opportunity to participate” in the deal-making process.Mr. Bronfman said in a statement that “Paramount’s best days are ahead.” Mike Blake/Reuters“While there may have been differences, we believe that everyone involved in the sale process is united in the belief that Paramount’s best days are ahead,” Mr. Bronfman said. “We congratulate the Skydance team and thank the special committee and the Redstone family for their engagement during the go-shop process.”Mr. Bronfman said in his statement that Paramount was “an extraordinary company,” calling it “an unrivaled collection of marquee brands, assets and people.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More