Days before the deadline, the White House did not say whether President Joe Biden would do a sit-down interview with Fox as part of his pre-Super Bowl coverage.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters today: “I don’t have anything to look at on Sunday.” Also, Fox News, which was to do the interview for the station, did not say a word.
Time is clearly running out, as Bret Baier pointed out during the State of the Union coverage. “We are few days.”
Meanwhile, a pro-Joe Biden ad was seen during the Fox News broadcast The five, which draws more viewers than any other cable news program. The spot came from Future Forward USA Action, one of the largest independent fundraising groups backing Biden in the 2020 presidential campaign, with supporters from an affiliated PAC including hedge fund director Stephen Mandel and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.
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 interviewed NBC’s Matt Lauer. This was the beginning of a tradition that has continued almost uninterrupted ever since.
However, Donald Trump skipped the pregame interview in 2018 when NBC hosted. The reasons were not entirely clear. He labeled the network “fake news,” but he labeled many other channels the same way. But Trump returned to talks with Margaret Brennan the following year Face the nation.
Fox News is not exactly friendly territory for Biden, who with his constant stream of opinion programming misses few opportunities to attack him and his administration. Fox Nation, the network’s subscription streaming service, even had a mock trial against the president’s son, Hunter Biden. During Tucker Carlson’s show on Tuesday, just before Biden’s State of the Union address, the chyron gave an update that read: “Mannequin President has left the White House.”
But Fox News was willing to send one of its news personalities, such as Bret Baier or Shannon Bream, to interview the president. That would be a change from the Obama years, when Bill O’Reilly, then his main primetime anchor, was sent in for interviews in 2011 and 2014. The last time Fox had Super Bowl rights, 2020, was Sean Hannity’s interview with Trump.
Since the State of the Union address, Biden has traveled to pitch his economic agenda, bolstered by a recent box office report and falling inflation. An interview with Fox News could lead to a blunder or misstep that overshadows this coverage while the network has focused extensively on immigration and border issues. But the advantage is a large audience, even in the pre-match, which has more than 20 million viewers.
Biden sat down with Lester Holt for NBC’s Super Bowl coverage last year and Norah O’Donnell on CBS the year before.
Source: Deadline
Mary Crossley is an author at “The Fashion Vibes”. She is a seasoned journalist who is dedicated to delivering the latest news to her readers. With a keen sense of what’s important, Mary covers a wide range of topics, from politics to lifestyle and everything in between.
