One of the recent traditions of Super Bowl Sunday is that the president of the United States sits down with the network hosting the game for an interview.
But it didn’t happen this year. President Joe Biden was not interviewed by Fox, which carried Sunday’s Super Bowl.
Did Biden fumble a chance to speak to the American people? Or did he do the right thing by eluding an interview with a network that constantly bashes him and his job as president? Did Biden bail on Fox or did Fox pull the plug?
More on all that in a second.
But let’s start here: Do people even care?
Fox’s pregame show was officially five-and-a-half hours long. That’s a lot of air to fill. So you can see why the networks are looking for content.
And you can see why a president would welcome such an opportunity to speak to so many Americans — although the reach isn’t as great as many might think.
More than 100 million people watch the Super Bowl. People like to throw out that number and say, “Here’s a chance for the president to speak to 100 million people at one time.” But the fact of the matter is that nowhere near that many people watch the pregame show. That number is typically in the 20 million range. (Granted, that’s still a sizable number.)
Here’s the thing: If you’re a big enough football fanatic to watch five hours of a Super Bowl pregame show, do you really want to hear from the president — any president — about health care or immigration or anything that doesn’t involve football?
The presidential Super Bowl interview started back in 2004 when then-President George W. Bush was interviewed by CBS sports broadcaster Jim Nantz. That interview, which lasted only four minutes, was not a hard-hitting one, nor was it supposed to be. Nantz and Bush talked about Houston hosting that Super Bowl, how the Super Bowl had practically become a national holiday, Bush’s plans for watching the game and which team he was rooting for. The only beefy question Bush was asked was about performance-enhancing drugs in sports.
Eventually, during the Obama administration, the interview was taken over by journalists from the network’s news division and questions alternated between sports and serious issues. Many point to Bill O’Reilly’s 2014 interview with then-President Barack Obama on Fox as when the interview started to become especially political. That interview was notable for O’Reilly pressing Obama on Benghazi.
From then on, the president was expected to sit down with the Super Bowl network and if the interview wasn’t at least a little contentious, the interviewers were crushed for being too soft.
But presidents kept agreeing to the interviews until Donald Trump refused to sit down with NBC and Lester Holt in 2018.
That brings us to Biden, who did interviews with NBC last year and CBS the year before that.
So what happened this year?
Reports are that Fox extended the offer to interview Biden and that the interview would be conducted by one of Fox News’ news anchors, Bret Baier or Shannon Bream. You could see why Biden would not agree to an interview with, say, Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity — who constantly bash Biden and are more along the lines of entertainers than serious journalists.
Now, to be clear, Fox has the right to choose any person it likes to conduct the interview and no network should let any president dictate who can or cannot do an interview or what topics are allowed. But it did seem as if Fox put forward a good-faith proposal of having either Baeir or Bream conduct the interview.
Politico’s Playbook wrote, “(Biden) should relish a chance to spar with his conservative critics, some Democrats would argue — much as he did during his speech Tuesday, where he parried lawmakers’ boos with quips that made him appear light on his feet.”
At the same time, Biden had every right to turn down Fox’s interview request for whatever reason he wanted. And let’s be real: It doesn’t take a diehard Fox News viewer to understand why Biden might think he wouldn’t get a fair shake from someone who works at the conservative network. You could even argue that by sitting down at all, Biden would be “normalizing” a network that some see as intentionally biased and divisive. Biden has not done a one-on-one interview with Fox News since he became president.
Mediaite’s Colby Hall wrote, “The cable news outlet, which spent years propping up Trump, is a 24-hour machine that churns out minute-by-minute attacks on Biden. Every move from the president is a scandal; every speech is an embarrassment; every victory is an illusion.”
For a few minutes there, it appeared that Biden had agreed to do an interview with Fox Soul — a little-known streaming service of Fox — to, presumably, talk about issues that greatly impact people of color. But that fell through, with Fox and the White House each pointing a finger at the other as to why it never happened. The New York Times’ Michael D. Shear and Michael M. Grynbaum reported a source in the know told them that Fox was OK with Fox Soul handling the interview.
So we ended up with Biden not being interviewed on Fox before the Super Bowl.
In the end, the White House and Fox News will both claim the high road. The White House will say it offered to do an interview (with Fox Soul) and Fox will say Biden refused to sit down with the network.
Know what’s funny? In the end, most people don’t even care. The big question during Sunday’s Super Bowl pregame wasn’t “Where’s Biden?” It was, “Do you think we have enough wings?”
More media tidbits and links …
- On Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” MSNBC’s Symone Sanders-Townsend talked about some GOP members yelling out during Biden’s State of the Union address, saying, “The booing — it was tasteless. And it allowed the president to engage with the hecklers, but come away not looking small, which is often hard to do.”
- Appearing on ABC’s “This Week,” former New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie said it was a “big mistake” for Republicans to heckle Biden during the State of the Union, adding, “It doesn’t get you anywhere, and it gave Joe Biden an opportunity to engage them back in a way that was spontaneous, that I think was probably the best part of his entire speech.”
- Two big weekend stories regarding Trump to check out from The Washington Post. Josh Dawsey with “Trump campaign paid researchers to prove 2020 fraud but kept findings secret.” And from Michael Kranish, “After helping prince’s rise, Trump and Kushner benefit from Saudi funds.”
- Another gripping story in The Washington Post from Louisa Loveluck and Alice Martins: “She lost her husband in the quakes. No one knows how to tell her about her son.”
- Tuesday is the fifth anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people and injured 17 more. “CBS Sunday Morning’s” Rita Braver profiles David Hogg, co-founder of March for Our Lives.
- Super Bowl viewership will come out today and I’ll have that and more analysis from the big game in Tuesday’s newsletter. But one quick thing I wanted to mention. Fox Sports’ Michael Strahan had a good pregame feature on Damar Hamlin, the Buffalo Bills player who nearly died on the field earlier this season when he was hit in the chest. Hamlin told Strahan that the toughest part of his ordeal was processing his emotions and, “I kind of like my privacy, but this situation kind of brought me to the light of the world, which is a good thing in a way.”
- For more of Strahan’s interview with Hamlin, check out this morning’s “Good Morning America” on ABC.
- Also, a powerful column about the dangers of football from New York Times sports columnist Kurt Streeter with “A Skeptic in Football Paradise.”
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