By DIANE DENISH
Corner to Corner
© 2024 New Mexico News Services
Research shows most of us watch network or cable stations whose reporting or commentary we find most appealing and with which we agree – especially in election season. I rarely watch Fox News.
Nevertheless, last week I saw an alert reminding me Vice President Kamala Harris was about to do her first ever interview on Fox News. I decided to tune in, as did 7.8 million other viewers – over half of them women.
The event was promoted as an interview but what the vice president got was a debate – and a contentious one. She also experienced a lot of what is called “manterruption”, a phrase coined by Jessica Bennett of Time Magazine in 2015. Manterruption is the unnecessary interrupting by men of women.
In 2014 a George Washington University study showed men interrupt women 33% more frequently than they do other men. In 2017 a study by Pritzker Law School showed that male Supreme Court justices interrupt the female justices three times as often as they do the other male justices.
An interview is defined as one person asking questions and the other person answering. There are job interviews and media interviews. In politics, they are the same.
A debate is a formal discussion on a particular topic in a public venue or assembly, in which opposing arguments are put forward. This would have happened if Donald Trump had stepped up and accepted the Fox News invitation for a second debate.
No worries, he had Bret Baier consistently interrupting and tossing in Trump talking points.
Here’s how it went for most of the interview: Baier would put forward a question. Harris would begin to answer the question. Baier would interrupt with an opposing Donald Trump talking point.
The first interruption came just 20 seconds into the interview. What followed was 38 interruptions in 26 minutes.
This wasn’t Kamala Harris’s first experience with a man interrupting. The most notable was during the 2020 vice presidential debate. Mike Pence interrupted her 10 times. She interrupted five times, one of them to interject her still memorable quote, “Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking.”
In the Fox News interview, host Bret Baier continued the tradition of “manterruption.” Using Trump talking points he tried to get her to join the Trump name calling by interrupting to ask if those supporting Trump were “dumb” or “stupid”. After a strong no she skillfully used that question to point out Trump’s calling his opponents “the enemy within”.
Towards the end, Baier said, “We’re talking over each other, I’m sorry.” A more accurate description is that he was, as the interviewer, consistently interrupting her responses.
Harris was aware Fox News was unfriendly territory. She knew she needed to thread the needle of being a woman who could push back without being branded as “angry”.
As over 4 million women watched, she rose to the occasion.
When Harris called out Trump’s attacks on Americans as “the enemy within”, Baier tried to set her back by showing what he called a response to the criticism. It wasn’t even close. So, in a strong, calm, authentic way, she reminded him that the clip he showed had nothing to do with the phrase “the enemy within”. Twenty-four hours later Baier admitted the error.
Manterrupting is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to women. And, whether it was a debate or an interview, what Fox did was remind millions of women about their own experiences of men interrupting, whether in politics, in the workplace, in the board room or in families.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote the next day that Kamala should “send Baier a bouquet of flowers”. Indeed, Baier’s interruptions and bias gave her the opportunity to shine, present facts, and show Americans why she should be president.
