Josh Marshall comments on the unwillingness of Vice President Harris to do interviews with (some of) the large news organizations (boldface mine):

But there’s something a bit different in this presidential cycle. Harris has now taken questions from the inside the Beltway press, in impromptu sessions, in a sit-down interview with CNN’s Dana Bash, with reporters at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, where Daniels was actually one of the questioners. But again and again these interviews have focused on process questions and restating opponents’ attacks and asking Harris to respond. In Dana Bash’s interview with Harris and Walz the most focused questions were over whether or not Harris had “flipflopped” on fracking on and why Walz had said he and his wife used IVF rather than a related but distinct fertility treatment. In other words, they actually haven’t been very substantive at all. They are more confrontational. But absent a basis in policy particulars it’s not clear why that’s better than an at-length interview in which potential voters get a feel for who the candidate is and discuss issues like abortion rights or jobs or foreign wars or immigration policy in ways that actually connect with people’s lives. The whole proposition becomes more a matter of candidate feats of strength for campaign gatekeepers than questions that are particularly substantive or ones that campaign reporters have an especial ability to address.

I should note here: I’m not picking on Dana Bash. Her interview is what we now expect from a major media interview. The problem isn’t the interviewer but the format, the genre of interview. Not only are these interviews not terribly valuable for the candidate; they’re not terrible valuable as journalism. You can tell your favored candidate to blow off the prestige MSM interviews guilt free…

You could just surf politics twitter for a few days, get a sense of the current attack lines and you’d basically be set. That’s harsh but it’s not hyperbole. It’s true.

This is the legacy of Tim Russert, where the assumption is that, if you catch the interviewee in a misstatement or contradiction, you have somehow done a serious journalism (as opposed to just doing a straight news story about the issue). Marshall is correct in that it’s not very useful because, if it were useful, Donald Trump would have been sunk a long time ago. Doesn’t seem like an effective accountability measure.