Trump is now running scared of the media. Where are the headlines?

We've seen endless criticism of Harris for supposedly not giving interviews, but she's on a media blitz right now while Trump has disappeared.

Vice President Harris appeared on “60 Minutes” on CBS last night—the most-watched news program in America—facing questions from reporter Bill Whitaker. Donald Trump was scheduled to sit for a “60 Minutes” interview as well, but backed out at the last minute according to a scathing explanation by Scott Pelley.

Trump is someone who loves media attention, so he’s rarely thought of as running from the media. But in these final months of the campaign, he’s sheltered himself in a cacoon. Sure, he held a few events he dubbed “press conferences“ since August, but he actually rambled on for almost an hour at each and took few questions or no questions at all, duping the TV media into covering him unfiltered.

You wouldn’t know it from the media coverage, but Trump actually hasn’t done a one-on-one interview with any mainstream independent journalist since he sat for an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists and attacked Harris’ racial identity. That was on July 31—nearly two and a half months ago.

Since then, Trump has only spoken to Fox, Newsmax, and other propaganda networks—either in phone interviews, specials, or faux “town halls”—and a whole bunch of far-right podcasters and radio hosts, mostly young men whose audiences he’s trying to get behind him.

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And honestly, that is his prerogative: he can speak to whoever he wants in making decisions about his campaign. But why has Vice President Harris been constantly criticized by the media during that same time period for supposedly not giving interviews?

Not only is it not true—she’s been consistently doing local media in battleground states, prominent podcasts, and radio interviews for weeks, in addition to CNN and MSNBC—but why is it okay for Trump to choose his target voters via unconventional platforms but when Harris does so she is depicted as depriving the larger public of knowledge about her?

And this week she’s on a media blitz, from “60 Minutes” and “The View,” to Howard Stern, Univision and Colbert, in addition to the huge podcast, “Call Her Daddy.” Yet, Politico even criticized that as too little, chastising other media for calling it a “blitz”:

DON’T CALL IT A ‘MEDIA BLITZ’ — After avoiding the media for nigh on her whole campaign, VP KAMALA HARRIS is … still largely avoiding the media.

That’s not the Playbook lead her team is gonna want to read this morning after announcing at 5 a.m. that she’s blitzing the airwaves with unscripted sit-downs in the coming days. A quick rundown of her plans …

Today: Harris’ taped interview with podcast “Call Her Daddy” — centered on reproductive rights — goes live. … Tomorrow: Her sit-down interview with Bill Whitaker, taped Saturday, airs on CBS News’ “60 Minutes” … Tuesday: Harris heads to New York to appear on “The View,” “The Howard Stern Show” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” … Thursday: Harris flies to Nevada for a Univision town hall.

Let’s be real here: Most of these are not the types of interviews that are going to press her on issues she may not want to talk about, even as voters want more specifics from Harris. Instead, expect most of these sit-downs to be a continuation of the “vibes” campaign Harris has perfected.

This is ridiculous because “60 Minutes” is hardly soft journalism, and neither is Univision, the Spanish-language news network. But more to the point, who are they to tell Harris what audiences she needs to be speaking with? It’s her campaign, and she’s making strategic decisions about reaching the kinds of voters her campaign believes are vital to reach at this stage of the game.

And why aren’t they criticizing Trump not only for refusing Harris’ challenges to have a second debate but for dropping out of “60 Minutes” and for not having done any independent mainstream outlet since July 31?

The implication regarding Vice President Harris by the corporate media critics—who, let’s face it, also want the interviews for themselves and have a vested interest in slamming competition—is that she is trying to hide something and trying to avoid making any mistakes. Any good campaign will protect its candidate from the kind of media exposure that might cause tension, but it’s hardly the case that Harris is being overly-sheltered.

She’s doing live interviews on “The View” and with Stern, so it pushes back on those who claim she is only doing taped interviews and thus can’t be spontaneous and off-the-cuff. And she sat down with Dana Bash and Bill Whitaker, two seasoned journalists from the kind of news networks that Trump hasn’t sat down with in two and a half months.

The questions in some corporate media Harris interviews, frankly, are often stupid—as I pointed out at the time about Bash’s questions—or covering the same ground, as happened on “60 Minutes.” But there were no flubs or blowups on the part of Harris (or her running mate Tim Walz, who was interviewed for both and also went on Fox last weekend). So that also blew away the idea that she can’t handle being grilled.

So the corporate media criticism for why Harris isn’t doing more of their outlets is empty. She simply has a lot of voters to reach and is using a mix of corporate media and other outlets that reach millions more voters who don’t tune in to corporate media.

Trump, on the other hand, is only sticking to safe spaces. And the cancellation of the “60 Minutes” interview, using the bogus excuse that they would fact check him, should be creating headlines and having reporters ask what he is afraid of. Is it that he can’t tell the truth and is worried about more lies exposed at this tenuous time? Is it that the subject of his cognitive decline is receiving more attention, with a big piece in the New York Times over the weekend?

Whatever the case, it’s a story. Scott Pelley explained what happened in the opening of the “60-minutes” special:

It's been a tradition for more than half a century that the major party candidates for president sit down with 60 minutes in October. In 1968, it was Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey. This year, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump accepted invitations. 

Unfortunately, last week, Trump canceled. 

The Trump campaign had said that the interview would be this past Thursday at Mar-A-Lago, Trump's Florida home…

…Then, a week ago, Trump backed out. The campaign offered shifting explanations. First, it complained that 60 Minutes would fact check the interview. 

60 Minutes fact checks every story it broadcasts. 

Later, Trump said he needed an apology for his interview in 2020. Trump claims correspondent Lesley Stahl said, in that interview, that Hunter Biden's controversial laptop came from Russia. She never said that…

…Trump has said Harris doesn't do interviews because she can't handle them. He has declined to participate in a second debate with Harris. So the Monday night election special may have been the last opportunity between now and Election Day for a national audience to hear from both candidates on a range of issues, including the economy, immigration, reproductive rights and the wars in the Middle East and Europe.

Again, Trump has a right to speak to whatever media he wants to—as does Harris. But if the corporate media are going to focus on why Harris is doing fewer interviews with them than they’d like, then they certainly should be focused on what Trump is hiding and why the guy who embraces media is now running scared of it.