Biden-Fox Super Bowl Squabble Mars One of America’s Last Unifying Events

On Sunday, the Kansas City Chiefs will face the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII and 100 million Americans are expected tune in to watch the game on TV. They’ll be denied, though, the chance to see their president do the traditional interview tied to the event.Apparently, today’s poisoned politics doesn’t stop at the gridiron’s edge. Following wrangling between the White House and Fox Corporation, Mr. Biden will not appear on subsidiary Fox Soul as planned. While partisans toss around blame, the reality is that any network would move heaven and earth for an interview with a commander-in-chief. The buck stops with him.Fox, the White House said, “put out a statement indicating the interview was rescheduled, which is inaccurate,” meaning the network very much wanted the sit-down but Mr. Biden rejected it, snubbing a network that beamed his State of the Union address 4.69 million viewers, the largest share among 16 networks.A total of 27.3 million people watched the speech, the second smallest number in 30 years for a president addressing Congress. The lowest was Mr. Biden’s first SOTU, in 2021, seen by 26.9 million people. The Super Bowl draws an audience almost four times that, and if no fans care what network hosts it, why should their president?“What binds us?” Justice Thomas asked in a 2017 interview on Fox. “What do we all have in common anymore? When I was a child, even as much kept us apart, there were things that we held dear and that we all shared in common. We always talk about e pluribus unum,” he observed, meaning “out of many, one.” The justice asked “What’s our unum now? We have the pluribus. What’s the unum?”The Super Bowl is one of the last of those things Americans share. Whether we watch the intricacies of the game, the commercials, or just want to party, it’s our highest secular holiday, a chance to lay aside our troubles and cheer the competitors for the Lombardi Trophy, given to the winning team. Yes, many Democrats don’t like Fox News. This was the case when I worked there at its launch in 1996 and they boycotted the network despite its many left-leaning employees. I recall the newsroom breaking out in cheers when the Senate voted not to convict President Clinton in his impeachment trial.The people you don’t see in front of the camera aren’t rabid right-wing caricatures, either. They’re now denied the crowning professional achievement of setting up the interview, clipping the lavalier mic on Mr. Biden’s lapel, setting his lighting, and everything else. They’ll still have to work the game while the rest of us are enjoying beer and pretzels.President Obama had no love for Fox, either, but he knew the job wasn’t all just “Hail to the Chief,” so he sat down with Fox and William “Bill” O’Reilly twice at games. President Trump rejected NBC’s interview request in 2018. As Mr. Biden casts himself as the opposite of his predecessor, it’s worth noting that they’re now working from the same playbook.If I were booking a replacement for Mr. Biden, I’d choose Justice Thomas. He’s a huge fan of college football — the Nebraska Cornhuskers in particular — and he understands the unum brought by the games the pluribus play, as millions of us root alongside fans of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds.Justice Thomas would be a great interview, but a member of the high court has a different role in our republic than the president, though both swear oaths to uphold another thing that is supposed to bind us together: the Constitution. Mr. Biden often promises to “unify” the nation, but his absence on Super Bowl Sunday shows he only wants to huddle with members of his political team. That’s not presidential or, for that matter, good sportsmanship.

Biden-Fox Super Bowl Squabble Mars One of America’s Last Unifying Events

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