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They probably would have gotten to it on their own. But I think TPM Reader NR is right about the trajectory here.
There’s an added component to your piece today on the media’s call for Harris to do interviews and put forward policies — the demand was a Republican demand first, and the media picked it up. Reporters didn’t come to this in some collective epiphany that they wanted more from the Harris campaign, but instead heard Trump and Vance and their surrogates claiming Harrs was too weak or unprepared or stupid to handle a presser. It is, once again, the media being led around by the right wing on what’s important and not important.
As for your point that the media doesn’t really care about policy, there are two glaring examples from 2016 and 2020. The easiest one is from 2020 where the GOP decided not to draft or vote on a platform at all, but simply said, “We’re following Trump”. If there’s ever been a more substance free, policy devoid campaign than that one I’ve never seen it above dogcatcher. But the media mentioned it a little, but never demanded policy specifics beyond tax cuts and the border.
In 2016 there was a heartbreaking piece during Brexit when Trump went off to his golf club in Scotland and announced he’d have a press availability. The media dutifully showed up to the lectern out on a rough somewhere and for a good 45 minutes while Trump made them blathered on about what Trump was going to say about Brexit while showing the empty lectern. There was nothing happening, no news, no speech, not even a person in view of the cameras but the 24 hour cable channels stuck with it.
At the exact same time Hillary Clinton was giving a policy speech on how the federal government could support parents with expanded WIC funding, funded maternal care through the ACA, aggressive expansion of early childhood education, and tax credits for child care. It was a well thought out policy that had the potential to help millions of moms and dads but no one remembers it because the media prefered to cover an empty lectern and speculate on another country’s referendum on the EU during the height of a US presidential election.
At an important level, Harris shouldn’t want to and can’t expect to be judged by the bar set by Donald Trump, a degenerate scamp on his best days and a virulently racist wannabe dictator on his worst. But the comical disconnect between the two standards is one elite political reporters as a whole need to have some reckoning with. And beyond that, NR’s and many others’ responses to these complaints show the anger that has built up over the years over the almost total click-the-snooze-button, we-don’t-have-time attitude of most campaign reporters when it comes to discussions of policy. Sure, everyone hates the press and just finds their own reasons to do it. Sometimes the press as a group and concept does indeed become the punching bag for all of people’s gripes and grievances about how campaigns and politics generally play out. But there’s a very legitimate gripe here. And it’s the source of the intensity of a lot of the pushback on this front.