What the Fox is happening with the annual Super Bowl interview with President Joe Biden?
The White House on Friday night appeared to squelch any hope of the pre-game ritual taking place, noting that it had not signed off on any exchange between the president and any representative of Fox Corp., the media company with the broadcast network showing the Big Game.
“As we said earlier, we had arranged an interview with Fox Sports Host Mike Hill & Vivica A. Fox with the President ahead of the Super Bowl and Fox Corp had the interview cancelled. FOX has since put out a statement indicating the interview was rescheduled, which is inaccurate,” a White House spokesperson said.
The new statement adds another level of back-and-forth brinkmanship between the Biden White House and the company that operates one of its biggest critics, Fox News Channel.
The two sides had appeared to find common ground earlier in the day, with Fox Corp. agreeing to an earlier effort by Biden aides to hold an interview with personnel from Fox Soul, a little known digital outlet that is part of Fox’s local TV operations.
But Fox’s original intention was to have Biden interviewed by Fox News. The idea didn’t seem to go over well with the White House. Earlier Friday, a Fox News executive told Variety that “We offered an interview with our top news anchors with no strings attached. They’re walking away from a huge audience and it’s a major missed opportunity.” Within minutes, the White House Press Secretary tweeted that an agreement for an interview with Fox Soul had been scrapped by Fox Corp.
Fox Corp. later tried to embrace the new idea. “After the White House reached out to Fox Soul Thursday evening, there was some initial confusion. Fox Soul looks forward to interviewing the President for Super Bowl Sunday,” Fox Corp. said in a statement. The Fox broadcast network is expected to televise Super Bowl LVII on Sunday, February 13.
A pre-game interview in front of the Super Bowl audience has been a staple of the gridiron spectacular since 2009, a ritual that President Barack Obama took part in throughout his two terms. President Donald Trump declined to participate in 2018 with NBC News. President Biden has, since his inauguration, done interviews with both NBC News’ Lester Holt and CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell.
The Biden White House and Fox News have often seemed at odds, with the cable outlet’s primetime opinion hosts spending hours and hours hurling broadsides at the president and his work. The outreach to Fox Soul appears to have taken place while Fox News was still in talks about what was expected to be a more traditional exchange.
Fox News had been planning to offer one of its news correspondents to handle the duties, a notable change from how it has approached the assignment in years past. Fox News has for years dispatched one of its opinion hosts to question the Commander in Chief. Bill O’Reilly lobbed questions at Obama in 2011 and 2014 and President Trump in 2017, while Sean Hannity quizzed Trump in 2020. Both Shannon Bream, the host of “Fox News Sunday,” and Bret Baier, a longtime anchor of Fox News’ top political events and elections, were seen as contenders for the assignment, according to the person familiar with the situation. Bream has impressed executives recently by increasing viewership of the program by people between 25 and 54 — the demographic most coveted by advertisers. And she has booked several Democratic officials in recent weeks.
The Super Bowl “get” is a coveted one. The interview can generate headlines for several days, and play out on networks’ nightly news and morning programs. It can also be tricky, especially if it is broadcast live. Savannah Guthrie’s pre-game talk with Obama in 2015 was “really tricky,” she told Variety in the following year. “You have to remember, this is an interview that takes place in the Super Bowl pre-show. The last thing everyone is thinking about or wanting to talk about is politics.” The assignment, she said, “is striking the right balance, having the right tone for the context of the day, but you want to do an interview that is helpful, asks some important questions.” Scott Pelley, Matt Lauer and Gayle King are among the TV-news correspondents who have handled the interview in the past.
The original Super Bowl talk with a sitting U.S. president was decidedly less formal. President George W. Bush, for example, took part in a Super Bowl coin toss in 2002 and bantered with Jim Nantz of CBS Sports before the network’s 2004 broadcast of the event.