Harris and Walz embark on media blitz amid Republican criticism that they're avoiding press

With 30 days to Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are launching a media blitz that began on Sunday, with the two set to appear in a handful of interviews with traditional and new media figures, a senior Harris campaign official told NBC News.

The two sat down with CBS’ “60 Minutes” for separate interviews that will air on Monday, and each will appear on late-night comedy shows later this week. Harris will appear on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on Tuesday while Walz will sit down with Jimmy Kimmel for the Monday edition of “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

While in New York on Tuesday, Harris is also set to appear on “The View” and “The Howard Stern Show.”

In a pretaped interview set to run Sunday, the vice president sat down with Alex Cooper, the host of the widely listened to “Call Her Daddy” podcast.

Also on Sunday, Walz appeared on “Fox News Sunday” for his first Sunday show interview since he became the Democratic vice presidential nominee, during which he said, “I will own up when I misspeak. I will own up when I make a mistake.”

His remarks were in response to questions about several instances during the campaign in which he’s made misleading statements about the fertility treatments he and his wife received before the pair had children, and about his travel to China when he was a teacher.

The media blitz from Harris and Walz comes after Republicans have criticized the pair for weeks for avoiding taking questions from the media.

They’ve been particularly hammered by Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, who for a time over the summer even maintained a thread on X where he listed the number of days it had been since Harris sat down for what he considered to be a major interview, alongside the hashtag #WheresKamala.

On Saturday, in response to an NBC News request for comment on a tweet, William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, baselessly suggested that the Harris campaign was intentionally keeping Walz away from the public.

“Her running mate is nowhere to be seen since his catastrophic performance at the Vice Presidential debate. Perhaps Kamala Harris and the Cheney’s have shipped Tim Walz off to Guantanamo Bay in a bid to drop that dead weight off the Democratic ticket,” Martin wrote in an email.

But Harris and Walz’s slate of upcoming media appearances also comes after some Democrats began to express concerns that the campaign was being too risk-averse in the run-up to the election, avoiding one-on-one interviews and town-hall-style events that involve direct questions from voters.

The upcoming media interviews will also be accompanied by campaign events in battleground states for Harris and Walz.

Harris will be in battleground Nevada on Thursday for several campaign stops and a Univision town hall. On Friday, she’ll head to Arizona, another swing state, to campaign.