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      3 Takeaways From Kamala Harris’s Interview on MSNBC

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      As Vice President Kamala Harris parses out the details of her agenda, she has favored broad strokes over detailed policy papers. Only recently has she begun sitting for interviews, which have elicited few details about what her presidential administration might look like.Little about that careful approach changed during a 25-minute interview with Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC that was broadcast on Wednesday night. It was Ms. Harris’s first one-on-one interview on cable television since becoming the Democratic nominee.In her discussion with a friendly interviewer, the vice president again presented herself as a champion of the middle class and hit many of the same themes from her pro-business economic speech earlier in the day. She largely avoided direct questions about how she would govern and why some voters remain fond of former President Donald J. Trump’s stewardship of the economy.Here are three takeaways from Ms. Harris’s interview.Harris had roundabout answers to open-ended questions.Ms. Ruhle’s first question was about how Ms. Harris might respond to people who hear her proposals and say, “These policies aren’t for me.” The MSNBC host’s second was about why voters tend to tell pollsters that Mr. Trump is better equipped to handle the economy.Ms. Harris responded to the fairly basic and predictable questions with roundabout responses that did not provide a substantive answer.Instead of offering any explanation for why Mr. Trump polls better on the economy — a matter that has vexed Democrats as President Biden has overseen a steadily improving economy — Ms. Harris instead blasted Mr. Trump’s record. She blamed him for a loss of manufacturing and autoworker jobs and said his tariff proposals would serve as an added sales tax on American consumers.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

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      How A.I., QAnon and Falsehoods Are Reshaping the Presidential Race

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      Three experts on social media and disinformation share their predictions for this year’s chaotic election.This year’s presidential election has been polluted with rumors, conspiracy theories and a wave of artificial intelligence imagery. Former President Donald J. Trump has continued to sow doubts about election integrity as his allies across the country have taken steps to make election denial a fixture of the balloting process.How worried should voters be?To better understand the role that misinformation and conspiracy theories are playing this year, The New York Times asked three authors of new books about disinformation and social media to share their views and predictions.The risk that violence could spring from election denialism seems as pressing as in the weeks after the 2020 election, when Trump supporters — incensed by false claims of voter fraud — stormed the Capitol building, they argue. But the day-to-day churn of falsehoods and rumors that spread online may be getting largely drowned out by the billions spent on political advertising.In a series of emails with The Times, the authors laid out their predictions for the year. These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.Q. Let’s jump right in: How concerned are you that conspiracy theories and misinformation will influence the outcome of this year’s presidential election?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

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      TikTok Expands its Election Resources Ahead of November

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      The company is an increasingly popular source of political news. It’s adding more content about how elections work and media literacy.TikTok is pushing to improve information about the upcoming U.S. presidential election on the app, it said Wednesday.The company will expand a landing page on how elections work and why they can be trusted and run new in-feed videos about media literacy. It will also increase security requirements for verified accounts from politicians and governments in the United States. Vice President Kamala Harris, former President Donald J. Trump and their vice-presidential nominees each have TikTok accounts as of two weeks ago, a sharp pivot from last year, when the vast majority of American politicians were avoiding the app.TikTokTikTokThe efforts come as TikTok warily acknowledges that it has become a much bigger news source for millions of Americans ahead of the presidential election than it was in 2020. It joins other major tech companies like Meta, Google and X that must regularly grapple with how their platforms handle election-related content. But TikTok has an added layer of scrutiny, since it is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance and faces a looming possibility that its app could be banned as soon as January, based on national security concerns.“Young people are going to TikTok and other vertical video platforms for news more than ever,” said Alex Mahadevan, the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, which worked with TikTok to create a series of videos on media literacy that will soon begin airing to users. “As of late, TikTok has been investing a lot in media literacy and fact-checking.”The U.S. government has expressed some concern that TikTok could imperil future elections. The Justice Department said in July that China could direct ByteDance and TikTok to manipulate videos served to Americans to “undermine trust in our democracy and exacerbate social divisions.” President Biden signed a landmark law in April that will ban TikTok in the U.S. in January unless ByteDance sells the app to a non-Chinese company.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

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      Brian Stelter Returns to CNN as Chief Media Analyst

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      Mr. Stelter, who left CNN two years ago, will be helming his newsletter for the network, but without a Sunday show.CNN’s “Reliable Sources” is back. Kind of.Brian Stelter, a media reporter and pundit who left CNN two years ago amid differences with the network’s previous leadership, is returning to the company as its chief media analyst and writer of its “Reliable Sources” newsletter.The network’s Sunday morning round table of media criticism that he had hosted, also called “Reliable Sources,” will not return. In his new role, Mr. Stelter will serve as an on-air analyst in addition to writing his newsletter and reporting for the network.Mr. Stelter, 39, announced his return to CNN on Tuesday in the newsletter he founded, saying he was back at the network in a somewhat different capacity.“I loved my old life as the anchor of a Sunday morning show but, to borrow some lingo from my video game blogger days, I finished that level of the game,” Mr. Stelter said. “Time for new levels, new challenges.”Mark Thompson, CNN’s chief executive, said in a statement that he was “happy to welcome” Mr. Stelter back to CNN, calling him “one of the best global experts in media commentary.”Mr. Stelter replaces Oliver Darcy as author of the newsletter. Mr. Darcy recently left the network to start his own subscription-based news site, Status, which focuses on media and entertainment news. CNN also regularly calls upon Sara Fischer, a media reporter for Axios, as an on-air analyst.Mr. Stelter, a former New York Times reporter, joined CNN in 2013 as host of “Reliable Sources” under the network’s president at the time, Jeff Zucker, and left in 2022 after a new leader, Chris Licht, reprogrammed the network. When Mr. Licht took over, he sought to steer the network away from partisan analysis that had become popular on CNN during the administration of President Donald J. Trump. In some cases, that meant removing voices that he perceived as too liberal. Mr. Stelter was among the prominent network hosts who audience research showed were most closely associated with having a liberal tilt.Mr. Stelter began negotiating his return to CNN in the last three weeks, after Mr. Darcy announced plans to leave the network, according to a person familiar with the matter. Mr. Darcy’s decision was unrelated to Mr. Stelter’s appointment, another person said.In the inaugural edition of his new newsletter, Mr. Stelter was reflective about his bumpy departure from CNN, saying it allowed him to experience the news “more like an everyday consumer,” honing his focus on “the attention economy and the information ecosystem.”“I always scoffed at people who said ‘getting fired was the best thing that’s ever happened to me’ — until, well, it happened to me,” Mr. Stelter wrote. More

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      Maybe We Are Asking Presidential Candidates the Wrong Questions

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      If the goal of the CNN interview with Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was to relitigate the campaign controversies of the last month — to get the candidates to talk about the major narratives of the election so far — then it was a rousing success. Harris easily dispatched questions about her identity and gave a strong defense of President Biden’s record. Walz, likewise, made short work of the charge that he had misled the public when he spoke about using one fertility treatment when it was actually another, similar treatment.But if the goal was to learn something about a prospective President Harris — to gain insight into how she might make decisions, order priorities and approach the job of chief executive — then I think the interview was not a success. Not so much for Harris or the viewing public.It might be interesting to journalists to know how Harris explains her changing views from 2019, when she ran for the Democratic nomination, to now, when she is the nominee. But it is not at all clear to me that it is interesting to viewers, who may be less concerned with how she deals with the question and more concerned with the actual substance of what she wants to do as president. A soft-focus question about a photograph, however iconic, seems less valuable than a question about Harris’s view of the presidency now that she’s spent almost four years in the passenger’s seat as vice president.Speaking for myself, I am less interested in hearing candidates navigate controversies or speak to narratives than I am in hearing them talk, for lack of a better term, about their theory of the office. How does a candidate for president conceptualize the presidency? What would she prioritize in office and how would she handle an endless onslaught of crises and issues that may, or may not, demand her attention? How does she imagine her relationship with Congress and how would she try to achieve her goals in the face of an opposition legislature? How does she imagine her relationship with the public and what value does she place on communication and the bully pulpit? Are there presidents she most admires — and why? Are there presidential accomplishments that stand out and how so? What are the worst mistakes a president can make? Why do you want this job in the first place?I can think of other questions along these lines, but you get the gist. To know what candidates for president think about the office and their role in it is, I believe, a better guide to what they may do in the White House than almost anything else. The only thing better is prior experience. These kinds of questions may not make for the most scintillating television, but I think they could provide the kind of insights that could actually help Americans decide what they want out of a national leader.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

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      How Dana Bash Handled Past Interviews With Kamala Harris

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      Vice President Kamala Harris’s interview on Thursday with Dana Bash of CNN is the first major unscripted moment of her young presidential campaign. But it isn’t her first encounter with Ms. Bash.The CNN political anchor has interviewed Ms. Harris on three occasions in the past few years. In those past meetings, Ms. Bash was a firm-but-fair interlocutor: sometimes granting Ms. Harris time to meander through lengthy answers, and sometimes pressing her, repeatedly, when the vice president equivocated on tough issues.It was Ms. Bash, in 2022, who elicited Ms. Harris’s memorably odd description of herself as “the daughter of a woman, and a granddaughter of a woman.” (The anchor was asking about the vice president’s reaction to the Supreme Court opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade.)In the same interview, Ms. Bash pushed Ms. Harris on the Biden administration’s plans to secure abortion rights in the wake of the ruling. The vice president declined to give a full-throated endorsement of the strategies floated by Ms. Bash, like challenging state laws or an executive action.“But what do you say to Democratic voters who argue, ‘Wait a minute, we worked really hard to elect a Democratic president and vice president, a Democratic-led House, a Democratic-led Senate. Do it now,’” Ms. Bash asked.“But do what now?” Ms. Harris replied.A 2021 interview at the White House, conducted at a distance because of pandemic protocols, appeared less tense. Ms. Bash asked Ms. Harris about being the first Black and Indian person to serve as vice president — “How is that bringing itself to bear in the White House?” — and seemed to agree with Ms. Harris’s contention that Congress should act to restrict certain gun rights.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

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      Harris and Trump Squabble Over Debate Rules as ABC Matchup Looms

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      At the weigh-in before a big bout, prizefighters often taunt their opponents in an effort to try to psych them out.So it goes with the presidential pugilists set to meet next month in the city of Rocky Balboa.The Harris and Trump campaigns squabbled on Monday over the ground rules of their coming ABC News debate in Philadelphia, with each side trying to score political points off the other.The tussle began on Sunday when former President Donald J. Trump blasted ABC in a social media post, suggesting that the network’s anchors and executives were biased against him and threatening, not for the first time, to pull out of the event. “I ask, why would I do the Debate against Kamala Harris on that network?” Mr. Trump wrote.Then, on Monday, Ms. Harris’s campaign went public with an effort to change one of the agreed-upon conditions for the debate: that each candidate’s microphone be muted when it isn’t their turn to speak.“We have told ABC and other networks seeking to host a possible October debate that we believe both candidates’ mics should be live throughout the full broadcast,” Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Harris campaign, told Politico.He added a dig for good measure: “Our understanding is that Trump’s handlers prefer the muted microphone because they don’t think their candidate can act presidential for 90 minutes on his own.”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

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      How Partisan Media Outlets Covered RFK Jr.’s Trump Endorsement

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      Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to suspend his presidential campaign and endorse former President Donald J. Trump was — depending on where on the political spectrum the coverage came from — treated with either outright glee — or derision. Conservative sites primarily focused on the potential electoral boon to Mr. Trump, while liberal media outlets focused more on Mr. Kennedy’s dysfunctional campaign, including by returning to several negative story lines.Mr. Kennedy announced on Friday that he would suspend his presidential campaign in key battleground states, though he intended to remain on the ballot in some states. He suggested he worried his presence in the race would pull voters away from other candidates, though recent polling wasn’t clear about who might benefit from Mr. Kennedy’s change in plans.Conservative sites, more than a dozen of which prominently featured the news on their home pages, saw the news as a win for Mr. Trump. They argued that Mr. Kennedy’s decision could reshape the race by turning Mr. Kennedy’s supporters into Mr. Trump’s, and by shifting the attention of Americans away from this week’s Democratic National Convention.Liberal media outlets described Mr. Kennedy’s decision as self-serving, and in keeping with his unpredictable campaign. Several referenced Mr. Kennedy’s assertion that Mr. Trump had offered him a role in a second Trump administration, something the former president declined to confirm on Friday. The sites referred to him using words like “power-hungry” and “transactional.”Here’s how the news was covered by a selection of outlets:FROM THE RIGHTThe Washington ExaminerWashington ExaminerThough polling suggests Mr. Kennedy’s decision is unlikely to significantly shift the race between Vice President Kamala Harris and Mr. Trump, many conservative commentators said the decision could swing the contest. Ben Shapiro, the editor in chief of The Daily Wire, said in a livestream after Mr. Kennedy suspended his campaign that the announcement, which was made during a speech in Phoenix, could “dwarf” the positive impact of the Democratic National Convention for Ms. Harris.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