[T]he questions were not even close to good enough. The questions were soft. The follow-ups almost non-existent or soft. There were topics covered that shouldn’t have been covered. Way too much fluff … The bumpers and the teases were just ads for her campaign. … [A] disaster for journalism. … [A]lmost nothing came out of [it] to allow the American people to understand what kind of president she would be.
Journalist Mark Halpern, ABC News, MSNBC, Aug. 30, 2024
Kamala Harris Used Her VP [Tim Walz] as a ‘Big White Blankie’ [Emotional support blanket] in CNN Interview [too insecure to do the interview alone].
The Wrap, Aug. 31, 2024
The headline today is that there is no headline. There was really no news made from the event other than it occurred after [Harris] being the Democratic candidate for about a month. [It did not] resolve [concerns about her] ability to think on her feet.
Harvard J.D. and CNN Host Michael Smerconish, Aug. 30, 2024
CNN’s first sit-down media interview with VP Kamala Harris since she was [coronated as the candidate] … didn’t go great. Dana Bash [claimed] nothing was cut but we still got only about 16 minutes of speaking time from Kamala [emphasis added]. This was made more obvious by CNN’s decision to stretch the interview like pizza dough to [fill] an hour. 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. [It] was a missed opportunity.
The Spectator, Aug. 30, 2024
We knew we were in for a rigged deal from the start. … Bash told us right at the start that we’d see the interview “in its entirety.” But we know the interview lasted an hour and yet it was over in less than 50 minutes with multiple commercial breaks. Compounding the deception from “The Most Trusted Name in News” was a “LIVE” indicator on its broadcast chyron — the sort of indicator that a news network might use when its coverage is occurring live and unedited as opposed to pre-recorded and tweaked to the satisfaction of its interviewee.
Douglas Andrews, The Patriot Post, Aug. 30, 2024
Voters on [Twitter] Thursday accused VP Harris of “reading from a script” during her interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, calling it a “freaking joke,” despite the sit-down being pre-recorded [similar to] the behavior [of] President Biden who is unable to make official remarks without reading a script. “She keeps looking down at her notes,” one commented, noting the convenience of the camera angle purposely only showing [Harris] from only the chest up.
The Mirror, Aug. 29, 2024
[Kamala’s CNN interview] was a catastrophe because it exposed the case against her as true. All of the advantages that were conferred upon her by Dana Bash’s easy questioning, by the editing, by the combination of interview and infomercial they put together, yielded that. The word salad [in] the first clip CNN released, the highlight. … That was the best that she could do?
The National Review, Aug. 30, 2024
‘Joke of a network’: CNN blasted for Kamala Harris ‘puff piece’ montage.
Skynews Australia, Aug. 30, 2024
An interview it was not.
Harris shopped for months for a “moderator” that would make her look and sound competent and capable … and eventually found what she was looking for [Dana Bash] However, even though CNN’s Bash did her best imitation of a real journalist conducting a hard-hitting interview, Harris failed. Bash got no coherent answers from Harris who has had weeks to prepare for this event, so Bash retreated to fluff questions: about the phone call from Biden telling her he was ending his campaign! Boring, irrelevant pancake talk and with her teary-eyed claim about just caring for Joe first, probably untrue. There was the clip about Tim Walz’s son crying at the DNC. CNN ran the tears-for-dad shot, … Then there was the equally boring clip about the allegedly viral, “iconic” photo of Harris’ grandniece watching Kamala’s speech … a colossal waste of time.
Patricia McCarthy, American Thinker, Aug. 30, 2024
Referring to Harris’ statement in a 2019 Town Hall that “There’s no question I’m [Harris] in favor of banning fracking” and her recent election year conversion statement that she would not ban fracking, Bash asked Harris why her “position on fracking” has changed, Harris replied, first, that she made clear in 2020 where she stood and, second, that “[M]y values have not changed.” In fact, both of Harris’ answers are false or misleading.
First, Harris did not make her position on fracking clear in 2020. What she is refers to is that in 2020 Joe Biden said he would not end fracking. She did not at that time endorse Biden’s position. Hopefully, Harris can distinguish between Biden and herself.
Second, Bash asked about her “position” on fracking, not about her “values.” One’s “position” on an issue is, in the ordinary sense, one’s opinion about it. One’s values, in American English, refer, roughly, to “the ideals, customs, institutions, etc., of a society toward which [one has] an affective regard.” The two are quite different. Joe Biden, who for years stated that as a Roman Catholic he is personally opposed to abortion but as a politician supports Roe’s “a woman’s right to choose” provides an excellent example. Kamala’s “answer” to Bash is a typical politicians dodge. She was not asked about her attitudes about fracking while she is philosophizing. She was asked what her policy about fracking would be as a president when the Left is pushing her to ban it – and she dodged it.
Some “liberal” news outlets attempted to deflect some of the criticism. MSNBC, which never saw a logical fallacy they didn’t like, counters that though Trump criticized Harris for a taped, rather than a live, interview, and for bringing Walz along, Trump himself has done taped interviews and sometimes brought others along. This is completely irrelevant because Trump does plenty of live interviews by himself in which one cannot get him to shut up. MSNBC insists on misunderstanding the fact that the criticism of Harris is not that she does a taped interview or that she brought Walz along. It is that she has ONLY done that.
Indeed, poor as Harris’ answers were, it is obvious that If her “values have not changed,” what are we to make of her attempt to convince us that she has become suddenly friendly to a border wall, hesitant to ditch our private health insurance, reluctant to require electric cars and opposed to a fracking ban? I know what I make of it. I don’t believe her for a minute.
No one in their right mind should believe this election year conversion Harris has contrived for her own ambition any more than one should believe her lies for years that Joe Biden was cognitively sound. If Harris really believes any of these new Trump positions, she need not wait for January 2025. She can begin demanding a border wall now, mass deportation of illegal aliens now, robust criticism of the Squad and others that demand an end to fracking and gasoline powered vehicles. But she won’t because it’s all shameless deception.
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