Joe Biden has yet to commit to a pre-Super Bowl sit-down interview with Fox News, but a pro-POTUS group is running ad spots on the network.
With just days to go, the White House has not said whether President Joe Biden will do a sit-down interview with Fox as part of its Super Bowl pre-game coverage.
“I don’t have anything to preview Sunday,” White House press secretary Karin Jean-Pierre told reporters today. There was no word from Fox News, which will conduct the interview for the broadcast network.
Clearly, time is running out, as Brett Baer pointed out during his State of the Union coverage. “Our days are running out.”
Meanwhile, a pro-Joe Biden ad, timed for release after his State of the Union address, appeared during Fox News. five, which draws more viewers than any other cable news show. The spot was from Future Forward USA Action, one of the largest independent spending groups backing Biden in the 2020 presidential race, with donors to an affiliated PAC including hedge fund managing director Stephen Mandel and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz.
George W. Bush sat down for an interview with Jim Nantz for CBS’ coverage of the Super Bowl in 2004. Five years later, Barack Obama gave an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer. This was the beginning of a tradition that has continued almost uninterrupted ever since.
Donald Trump, however, skipped the 2018 pre-game interviews when NBC was the host. The reasons were not entirely clear. He called the network “fake news” — but he labeled many other outlets the same. But Trump returned the following year to meet with Margaret Brennan Face the nation.
Fox News isn’t exactly friendly territory for Biden, missing a few opportunities to attack him and his administration with his consistent stream of opinions. Fox Nation, the network’s subscription streaming service, even featured a mock trial of the president’s son, Hunter Biden. During Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday, coming just before Biden’s State of the Union address, Kieron gave an update reading, “The mannequin president has left the White House.”
But Fox News is ready to send one of its news side personalities like Brett Baer or Shannon Brim to interview the president. That would be a change from the Obama years, when Bill O’Reilly, then its star primetime host, was sent in for interviews in 2011 and 2014. The last time Fox had Super Bowl rights, in 2020, Trump was interviewed by Sean Hannity.
Since the State of the Union address, Biden has been traveling and discussing his economic agenda, bolstered by recent blockbuster jobs reports and rising inflation. A Fox News interview could produce a misstep or misstep that would overshadow that messaging, while the network has focused heavily on immigration and the border. But the opposite is a huge audience, even pre-game, which has topped 20 million viewers.
Biden sat down with Lester Holt for NBC’s Super Bowl coverage last year, and the year before that, Norah O’Donnell on CBS.
! function(f, b, e, v, n, t, s) {
if (f.fbq) return;
n = f.fbq = function() {
n.callMethod ? n.callMethod.apply(n, arguments) : n.queue.push(arguments)
}
;
if (!f._fbq) f._fbq = n;
n.push = n;
n.loaded = !0;
n.version = ‘2.0’;
n.queue = [];
t = b.createElement(e);
t.async = !0;
t.src = v;
s = b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t, s)
}(window, document, ‘script’, ‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
fbq(‘init’, ‘422369225140645’);
fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);
