With a classic showman’s swagger, Bill O’Reilly declared that more people would see his live pregame interview with President Barack Obama on Sunday than “any other interview that’s ever been done in the history of mankind.”
He may well have been right. Last year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched television broadcast ever, drawing 106 million viewers. This year, the game happens to fall in the middle of the greatest foreign policy crisis of Obama’s presidency, following a week of complaints from the White House press corps about a lack of access to the president to ask about Egypt.
But there are a variety of factors that made the interview a possible win-win for Obama and Fox. The sheer size of the Super Bowl audience, O’Reilly’s history of giving the president a fair shake when he interviewed him as a candidate and the opportunity for Obama to look like a stand-up guy for stepping into the ring with a highly visible and highly vocal critic.
Considering the rocky past with Fox, it may seem strange that the White House would have agreed to the interview at all. Obama’s not in the habit of doing sit-downs with opinionated cable hosts. He hasn’t done one yet as president with the primetime hosts of the more ideologically aligned, though lower-rated, MSNBC, though he did sit down with Jon Stewart last fall.
Truth is, it wouldn’t have been easy for Obama to decline. There’s a recent tradition that the network that broadcasts the Super Bowl also gets to have one of its top personalities interview the president. Saying no to O’Reilly — especially after Obama sat down with CBS’s Katie Couric last year — would have touched off a whole new Obama vs. Fox story line, right at the moment Obama is trying to recapture his campaign persona as a bipartisan healer.
Still, the White House — which, like Fox News, did not respond to requests for comment for this article — is getting surprisingly little criticism from the Democratic Party’s liberal wing, which is usually quick to criticize Fox News.
O’Reilly, meanwhile, was bracing for criticism from the left and the right for his 14-minute live interview Sunday, which aired on local Fox stations.
Anita:
http://goddessdd.ning.com/
Posted By: anita moore
Monday, February 7th 2011 at 7:49AM
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