After a days-long saga of confusion, the White House said Friday President Biden’s much-anticipated Super Bowl Sunday interview with Fox News has been officially scrapped.
“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 told The Daily Beast.
This news comes a day after the White House initially announced that a Super Bowl Sunday interview had been scrapped by the parent company of Fox News. Afterwards, Fox Corp. reversed course and stated that the interview was back on.
“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,” a Fox Corp. spokesperson told The Daily Beast.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Friday morning claimed that Fox Corporation, the parent company of Fox News, had scrapped a Super Bowl Sunday interview with President Joe Biden. Fox News, meanwhile, claimed the White House turned down an interview with one of their anchors.
“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,” Jean-Pierre tweeted on Friday. “We’ve been informed that Fox Corp has asked for the interview to be cancelled.”
The lack of a pre-game interview would have broken from the tradition of the sitting president sitting down with a figure from the network hosting the big game. Fox is airing Sunday’s matchup between the Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles.
A White House official told The Daily Beast that the administration had locked in a pre-game interview with Fox Sports host Mike Hill and actress Vivica A. Fox, who hosts several programs on Fox Soul, the Fox Corp-owned streaming channel aimed at Black audiences. According to this official, the interview was set to air on Fox Soul on Sunday and could have been shared across Fox platforms, but the parent company nixed it. Fox Corp. didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jean-Pierre’s tweet came minutes after Variety reported that Fox News claimed the White House bailed on an interview with the network. “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,” a network source claimed to the trade publication.
CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter also reported on Thursday that the president was potentially snubbing Fox Corp.’s right-wing cable channel. (In the past, when Fox hosted the Super Bowl, it was often former Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, or at one point Sean Hannity, who’d conduct the pre-game presidential interview.) “We don’t have a formal no, but we are operating like it’s not happening,” a Fox News source told CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy, adding that the channel had yet to hear back from the White House.
Additionally, Fox News chief political anchor Bret Baier hinted during the network’s coverage of this week’s State of the Union address that the interview may not happen, claiming that his network hadn’t received an answer from the president.
During his time in office, Biden has yet to grant a single interview to Fox News, likely due to the relentless and personally vicious attacks its top opinion hosts have launched against him and his family.
Biden wouldn’t have been the first president to skip out on the Super Bowl chat since the tradition began in 2004. Former President Donald Trump declined a sit-down with NBC in 2018, after repeatedly deriding the network as “fake news.” Trump’s interview refusal also came after he spent months railing against NFL players for kneeling in protest during the national anthem. George W. Bush also didn’t do any during his second term.
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