Biden skipping interview is a missed opportunity
PHOENIX – Say it ain’t so, Joe. President Joe Biden has declined a pre-Super Bowl interview for the second year in a row.
It’s supposedly part of a larger media strategy. Kind of like how counting votes is part of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s larger political strategy.
There was none of the Sturm und Drang of last year, at least, when the White House went back and forth with Fox Corp. over whether Biden would sit for an interview. That was a missed opportunity.
This year it’s just a dumb mistake. After the special counsel investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents described him Thursday as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” it’s more important than ever that he appear.
In 2023 the interview was scheduled to be with Fox Soul, a streaming platform aimed at Black audiences. Both sides blamed each other for the collapse. Because that’s how we do things now. No offense to Fox Soul, but streaming views there wouldn’t come anywhere close to the exposure Biden would have gotten on Fox, the network that broadcast the game.
This year, the game is on CBS. It isn’t clear who would have interviewed the president, but my money would have been on Norah O’Donnell, the anchor of “CBS Evening News.”
When your presumptive opponent is flitting back and forth from one courtroom to the next, facing various indictments, you have the chance to answer possibly challenging, but by no means gotcha, questions and you pass? In an election year?
For the record, here is the explanation: “We hope viewers enjoy watching what they tuned in for – the game,” White House communications director Ben LaBolt told CNN.
Last year’s Super Bowl, played in Glendale, Arizona, attracted 115.1 million viewers; it was the most-watched telecast in history. Of any kind, not just football.
With the prospect of Taylor Swift jetting in from Japan, you can bet your bottom dollar that this year’s numbers will be bigger, probably much bigger. No, nothing in the pregame show is going to approach that, but the pregame ratings will also be plenty big.
The presidential Super Bowl interview started in 2004, when Jim Nantz, the play-by-play announcer for the game talked with then-President George W. Bush. One of former President Barack Obama’s interviews was with Bill O’Reilly on Fox News.
And Biden is not the first president to skip a Super Bowl interview. Former President Donald Trump skipped one in 2018 with NBC, when he was mad at the network.
Guess who volunteered to take Biden’s place this year? Trump, who reacted with characteristic charm on his Truth Social network: “A great decision, he can’t put two sentences together. I WOULD BE HAPPY TO REPLACE HIM – would be ‘RATINGS GOLD!’”
It’s hard to imagine a better platform, at a better time, than a sit-down before the Super Bowl. Biden said during the election campaign he will hammer home the notion that Trump is a threat to democracy. How? What’s he going to do, type up a statement and nail it to a tree in the park?
This is a golden opportunity for Biden to get his message across. Why on earth isn’t he taking it?