Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson scored one of the biggest interviews of the year on All the Smoke this week when Vice President Kamala Harris joined them five weeks ahead of the 2024 election.
Afterward, Barnes revealed he and Jackson cleared topics with the Harris campaign before the interview.
“We gave her a skeleton and an outline of the direction the conversation wanted to go,” Barnes said Tuesday on The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz. “And then literally, we were making up questions right up until we left in the car to go see her. I gave her my pitch on how we wanted to do it, have a good time. We wanted the country to get a chance to just know her a little bit better as a person.”
Barnes acknowledged he and Jackson “went back and forth” over whether to enter the political realm and conduct the interview on Harris’ terms “until the day we left” to record the episode at her home.
The hosts understood how it could rub their audience the wrong way or make them appear as biased, but in the end, they believed that the opportunity for their show and their audience was worth it.
“This wasn’t a clear-cut of ‘Hey, this is a tremendous opportunity, let’s go jump on it,'” Barnes said. “A lot of thinking went into this because we know who we are, what we are, and what we stand for. Sometimes, people don’t want to see those mix although I don’t mind them mixing. It’s not about me, it’s about our fans.”
Earlier this year, the Joe Biden campaign was harshly criticized for conducting an interview with Black-owned radio stations in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in which his campaign fed the hosts questions. A Philadelphia-based host for WURD resigned over the incident.
Of course, online content creators play by different rules. They are not journalists and often are proud of it. The same can be said of Donald Trump joining content creators like Adin Ross, Theo Von, and the Paul brothers for interviews this year.
Barnes and Jackson made their choice and hosted what was a fairly harmless interview with Harris. They also stopped short of sending along full questions to her campaign and were clear that they wanted the interview to be more about Harris the person than Harris the politician.
