Donald Trump brings back the tradition of the Super Bowl interview

The tradition of the president being interviewed on Super Bowl Sunday returns this weekend.

Fox Sports has this year’s Super Bowl and it was announced Monday that Fox News’ Bret Baier will sit down with President Donald Trump in an interview that will air during the long pregame show.

The interview will be pretaped and much of it will be shown during the pregame. In addition, some of the interview will also air the next day (Feb. 10) on Fox News’ “Special Report with Bret Baier,” as well as Fox News’ website.

Fox News told USA Today that the interview will “focus on the changes the Trump administration has enacted since the Inauguration and the first 100 days of his presidency.”

The big question is whether Baier will push Trump on the many controversial actions Trump has taken since his White House return, or if Baier will simply serve up a bunch of softballs. Baier has had, in general, a good reputation as a fair journalist, but that reputation took a bit of a hit last year when his interview with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris turned testy when he kept interrupting and talking over her. Let’s see if Baier is just as persistent in interrupting Trump if Trump goes on tangents, as he is wont to do.

Then again, it’s hard to know what to make of the Super Bowl interview these days.

Here’s what I wrote in 2023:

The presidential Super Bowl interview started back in 2004 when then-President George W. Bush was interviewed by CBS sports broadcaster Jim Nantz. That interview, which lasted only four minutes, was not a hard-hitting one, nor was it supposed to be. Nantz and Bush talked about Houston hosting that Super Bowl, how the Super Bowl had practically become a national holiday, Bush’s plans for watching the game and which team he was rooting for. The only beefy question Bush was asked was about performance-enhancing drugs in sports.

Eventually, during the Obama administration, the interview was taken over by journalists from the network’s news division and questions alternated between sports and serious issues. Many point to Bill O’Reilly’s 2014 interview with then-President Barack Obama on Fox as when the interview started to become especially political. That interview was notable for O’Reilly pressing Obama on Benghazi.

From then on, the president was expected to sit down with the Super Bowl network and if the interview wasn’t at least a little contentious, the interviewers were crushed for being too soft.

But presidents kept agreeing to the interviews until Donald Trump refused to sit down with NBC and Lester Holt in 2018.

President Joe Biden continued the tradition by being interviewed by CBS and then NBC in his first two years in office. The last two years, however, Biden did not sit down for a Super Bowl Sunday interview. Two years ago, the game was on Fox, and you figure he had no interest in sitting down with a Fox News personality. Then last year, he turned down an interview with CBS, which hosted the game.

I’ve changed my stance over the years on Super Bowl interviews. I used to think that the president had a rare chance to talk to so many people at one time that he had to do it. The Super Bowl itself typically draws well over 100 million viewers. But the pregame show comes nowhere near that number. An audience of 20 million would be considered good. Then again, most of the people who actually watch the pregame are likely to be football fans, and are fans receptive to mixing politics with their football? Probably not.

In the end, it’s only a few minutes, so there’s nothing wrong with networks asking the president and the president agreeing to do it. But, these days, with constant news coverage of a president who always seems to be in front of the media, I’m not sure the presidential interview will produce much news.

This, by the way, will be the third time Fox interviews Trump on Super Bowl Sunday. The first was in 2017 when he was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly. The other was in 2020 when he was interviewed by Sean Hannity.

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Avoiding the news, but staying informed

Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple did an online chat with readers on Monday, and I encourage you to check it out in its entirety. But I did want to point to one question that many of you might be struggling with.

A reader asked, “How can we stay on top of the most pressing issues facing our country without getting sucked down a rabbit hole or becoming so jaded we just check out? I'm a reporter and I can hardly keep up with all these developments and find myself having to let important updates slide, and I feel it's become a Sisyphean task for everyone else.”

What a good question.

Wemple replied, in part, “You have a great deal of company in experiencing difficulties keeping up with pounding of news stories in these early days of the second Trump administration. Of course, many or most of the news items these days stem from actions taken by Trump and his appointees — a loud and showy spasm of executive orders and other actions designed to prove to supporters that action on campaign promises is being taken without delay. I feel that the best approach is to stay away from firehoses like Facebook, Twitter and other places where little initiatives get blown up into big things and to stick to a couple of outlets that you trust. Read the top five or ten stories and then do something else. Clean the house; do pushups; call someone cool.”

Trading places

Maybe it’s because of that firehose of stressful news coming out of Washington, D.C., but I simply cannot get enough of the blockbuster NBA trade over the weekend that saw the Dallas Mavericks ship superstar Luka Dončić to the Los Angeles Lakers for a package that included all-star Anthony Davis, another young player and a first-round draft choice. The Athletic’s Jason Jones ranked it as the third-biggest trade in NBA history. Dončić, by most accounts, is considered one of the five best players in the world.

Seriously, I cannot stop reading stories about it, listening to podcasts about it and watching TV shows about it. The coverage has been splendid. What makes it so fun is that it’s a big deal in the sports world, incredibly interesting, and yet not important enough to beat you down like all the Washington political stuff.

Sometimes I rail on ESPN’s morning show, “Get Up,” saying they should change the name to “Get Up and Start Yelling About NFL Quarterbacks.” But Monday morning, the show was must-see TV with an array of experts and analysts such as Charles Barkley, Michael Wilbon and Stephen A. Smith all going on to discuss the trade that was as surprising as it was big.

How surprising? ESPN’s big NBA insider, Shams Charania, put out a breaking news tweet a little after midnight on Saturday announcing the trade and then had to put out another one 20 minutes later saying, “Yes, this is real.”

In an interview with Sports Illustrated’s Jimmy Traina, Shams (as he is known in NBA circles) said, “After I hit send, I don’t know what was going on with my phone. I had an overload of calls, I was getting an overload of text messages. I try to read all my messages. I try to have zero unread messages. I think at one point, it was close to 300 unread and a bunch of calls. I couldn’t get back to everyone. Obviously, I never had that happen before. Everyone was trying to figure out if this was real. Did you get hacked?”

Just writing about this makes me want to go read more about it.

Speaking of which …

Fox Sports 1 and nationally known radio personality Colin Cowherd got sick while talking about the Dončić trade. Literally.

During his show on Monday, Cowherd abruptly left the air because of an illness. As he was discussing the big trade, Cowherd told viewers and listeners, “Folks, I'm going to have to take a break. I'm getting very very sick very very quickly on this set and we will return.”

Cowherd’s sidekick, Jason McIntyre, took over for the rest of the show. Cowherd later tweeted, “Thank you for all the texts, calls, and concern. Sincerely touching.  Rough hour but I’ll be fine. That damn Luka trade may have just overwhelmed me.”

A Grammy snub?

The Grammy Awards were held Sunday night and there was a pretty major snub. No, not in the awards (although lots were upset that Billie Eilish did not win even one despite seven nominations), but in a red-carpet interview before the show.

The Associated Press had a live red-carpet show with hosts Leslie Ambriz and Krysta Fauria. The two were interviewing Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, but that screeched to a halt when Chappell Roan walked by. Fauria yelled out to Roan. Babyface, noticing that, handed his microphones back and said, “Go do that,” meaning they should interview Roan. To her credit, Ambriz apologized in real time to Babyface for the interruption. (Here’s the exchange.) Babyface was classy in how he handled it, but social media immediately jumped on the AP co-hosts for disrespecting a music legend.

Another music legend, Dionne Warwick, tweeted, “Am I seeing this correctly?”

Khloé Kardashian tweeted, “This is so disrespectful how Babyface was treated in this interview. Babyface has had such a significant impact on the music industry, in sooo many ways. Its maddening to see a LEGEND not get the respect and attention they deserve. He is a pioneer and deserves so much better than this.”

Those were just two of many.

Near the end of the livestream, Fauria apologized, saying, “I wanted to say that I’m really sorry about interrupting Babyface earlier. Chappell Roan had come up, and there was a lot of commotion, as there is on these carpets. But I’m a big Babyface fan, as are we all. And so I just wanted to say that I really apologize.”

On Monday morning, the AP made a formal apology on social media, posting, “We are deeply sorry for cutting our interview with Babyface short on our YouTube livestream of the Grammys red carpet. We have apologized to him through his representative and to our viewers on the livestream.”

Media tidbits

• Politico’s Katherine Tully-McManus writes about Marjorie Taylor Greene in “NPR and PBS first target in MTG’s DOGE crosshairs.”
• CBS News with “‘The Sopranos’ featured it. Now, The Star-Ledger newspaper is stopping print editions.”
• More controversy at the Los Angeles Times as the writer of an opinion piece says his commentary was edited to tone down his criticism of Health and Human Services Secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. NPR’s David Folkenflik has more.
• Meanwhile, there’s this depressing news from the Los Angeles Times. Semafor’s Max Tani reports the Times is offering voluntary buyouts to anyone who has been at the news outlet for more than two years. The email to staff said, “While the Times remains a vital source for news and information for our city, region, state and beyond, the economic landscape of the media industry continues to be extremely challenging. The difficult financial situation faced by the Times requires us to remain diligent in managing costs. By offering this voluntary buyout program, we aim to provide those of you who may be interested with the flexibility to explore your options.”
• Rupert Murdoch was in the Oval Office on Monday. Mediaite’s Alex Griffing has more in “Trump Showers ‘Legendary Rupert Murdoch’ With Praise in Oval Office Gaggle: ‘In a Class by Himself.’”
• This column is smart, fair and has a superb grasp on what’s going on. For Awful Announcing, DJ Dunson with “The Joe Roganization of Stephen A. Smith is here.”
• Reporters Without Borders has released a statement: “Trump’s foreign aid freeze throws journalism around the world into chaos.”
• Michael Wilner is joining the Los Angeles Times as its Washington bureau chief. Wilner joins the Times from McClatchy, where he was chief Washington correspondent. The L.A. Times has more.
• Speaking of D.C., at a time when many news outlets are cutting back, a local newspaper is expanding nationally. The Deseret News in Utah is upping its national political coverage with a new D.C. congressional correspondent and a D.C. bureau. Sarah Jane Weaver, editor of the Deseret News, said in a statement, “Having boots-on-the-ground coverage of Washington, D.C., is an important part of the Deseret News mission.” Here are the details.
• The Los Angeles Times’ Queenie Wong with “Once a Trump critic, Mark Zuckerberg pivots toward the president.”
• Alex Seitz-Wald, one of NBC’s top political reporters, is leaving to help lead a local news startup in Maine. Semafor’s Max Tani has more.

Hot type

• The Washington Post’s John Woodrow Cox and Hannah Natanson with “Children joked about school shootings. Then the sheriff sent them to jail.”

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