It’s official: President Joe Biden will not take part in a pre-game interview leading up to this year’s Super Bowl.
“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,” said a Fox News executive familiar with discussions. The Fox broadcast network is expected to televise Super Bowl LVII on Sunday, February 12.
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.
Fox News, which has handled the interview in the past when Fox broadcasts the Super Bowl, declined to make executives available for comment. In a statement, Karine-Jean Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, said “The President was looking forward to an interview with Fox Soul to discuss the Super Bowl, the State of the Union, and critical issues impacting the everyday lives of Black Americans. We’ve been informed that Fox Corp has asked for the interview to be cancelled..” Fox Soul is a streaming outlet operated by Fox News’ parent corporation that runs programming tailored for Black audiences.
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.”
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.