Image via WikipediaBill O’Reilly interview of Barack Obama could be victory for both - Keach Hagey - POLITICO.comBy: Keach Hagey
February 6, 2011 07:39 AM EST
With a classic showman’s swagger, Bill O’Reilly has declared that more people will see his live pre-game interview with President Barack Obama on Sunday than “any other interview that’s ever been done in the history of mankind.”
He may well be 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.
And most important, for those keeping score in the political media game, it will be the first time Obama sits down as president with the highest-rated host of the cable network he once called “entirely devoted to attacking my administration.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a more bitter rivalry in the NFL. And no one expects one interview to change that.
But there are a variety of factors that make 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.
“I think it’s a very smart idea for both Obama and O’Reilly to do the interview before the Super Bowl,” said Jane Hall, a former Fox News analyst and associate professor at American University’s School of Communication. “In the 2008 campaign, he did a terrific, serious, lively interview with Barack Obama that probably helped Obama with Republican voters.”
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, is bracing for criticism from the left and the right for his 14-minute live interview Sunday, which will air on local Fox stations.
“I fully expect to get hammered after the interview is over,” he wrote in his column this week. “Depending on how you feel about the president, the questions will either be too soft or too intrusive.”
His previous interview with Obama was able to be a “spirited back and forth,” he said, in part because Obama was a senator. When interviewing the president, “there is strict protocol” and “if I interrupt him too much, I look like a dope.”
That interview in September 2008, took a long time for O’Reilly to land. Three months before it, then-Sen. Obama met with News Corp owner Rupert Murdoch and Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes to air his concerns about whether Fox News was going to give him a “fair shake,” Ailes told Howard Kurtz. Until then, Obama had resisted going on Fox for months, but he left the meeting agreeing to an interview with O’Reilly before the election.
The interview was civil, even collegial at times, though not without interruptions from O’Reilly. He alternated between praising the candidate’s “good speech” and pointing out points of policy agreement between them, to saying Obama was “desperately wrong on the [Iraq] surge.”
That interview, though tough, stands in contrast to Bret Baier’s interview with Obama as president last March in the midst of the health care battle, which was so filled with interruptions that Baier apologized for it at the end, saying he was just trying to “get the most for our buck.”
Baier’s interview came six months after the Obama administration basically declared war on Fox News. The war began in October 2009, when Anita Dunn, then the White House’s communications director, called Fox “opinion journalism masquerading as news” in an interview. David Axelrod, then the president’s senior adviser, asked other news organizations to join the administration in declaring that Fox was “not really a news station.” Rahm Emanuel, then White House chief of staff, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Fox “is not a news organization so much as it has a perspective.”
With Axelrod departing the White House last month, none of these voices leading the attack on Fox is in the White House any longer.
“Having declared Fox not a news network didn’t work,” Hall said. “It was not a winning idea.”
The war didn’t last long. By November 2009, Obama had granted an interview to Major Garrett, then Fox News’s White House correspondent, in Beijing.
Although Fox’s primetime hosts remain critical of the president’s policies, particularly on health care, there have been signs of further thawing recently.
Following the president’s speech after the shootings in Tucson, Ariz., Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer and Chris Wallace participated in a Fox News panel, all giving positive marks. Hume said it was “precisely what the people of this region needed and wanted,” while Wallace called it a “very powerful speech.” Krauthammer said it was delivered in a “very skillfully, successful way.”
The praise caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh, who accused the Fox panel of “slobbering” over the speech because it was “all the things the educated, ruling class wants their members to be and sound like.”
That’s not to say that things can’t still be quite adversarial between Obama and Fox News. Fox has been emphasizing coverage of the lawsuit striking down the health care law for the past week. Also last week, Axelrod, signaling the kind of messaging that may be coming from the president’s Chicago reelection headquarters, responded to a question about the 2012 Republican field of candidates by saying they were “all Fox News personalities.”
Five potential candidates for the 2012 Republican nomination are Fox News contributors: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and John Bolton.
Axelrod attempted to use Palin’s and Huckabee’s Fox contracts against them in sizing them up as competition, POLITICO reported.
“She’s an interesting person,” he said of Palin. “I know she has a robust broadcast career at Fox. And I don’t know if she’s going to want to give that up. The same with Gov. Huckabee. He’s a very formidable person, very genial person, someone I personally like.” But, he added, “they have a great platform right now, and I don’t know whether they’re going to want to give that up.”
Hall, who appeared regularly on O’Reilly’s program until she quit Fox News over what she considered to be over-the-top rhetoric by Glenn Beck, cautioned against conflating Fox News and O’Reilly too much.
“[O’Reilly] considers himself and talks about himself as an independent,” she said. “I would say, compared to Sean Hannity, he is a person who does not always say what you think is going to be the predictable line from Fox News’s conservative hosts.”
This independence has sometimes cost O’Reilly. In the wake of the Tucson shootings, he complained on his show that he wasn’t able to book Palin, despite having defended her in his “Talking Points Memo” on his first day back on the air, and despite her being on his employer’s payroll. He had done some of the former Alaskan governor’s toughest interviews last summer. She went on “Hannity” a week later.
From the left, the loudest critique of Obama’s Super Bowl sit-down came from former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who delivered a “Special Comment” the night of the Tucson shooting, decrying violent rhetoric and calling on several Fox News personalities to apologize for their use of it in the past.
“If Glenn Beck, who obsessed about gold and debt and who joked about killing Michael Moore, and Bill O’Reilly who said, ‘Tiller the Killer,’ until it was burned into the minds of their viewers, if they do not begin their broadcasts with an apology, then those commentators and the others must be repudiated by viewers and listeners, by all politicans who appear on their programs, including President Obama and his interview with Fox on Super Bowl Sunday and by the networks that employ them,” he said.
“If they are not responsible for what happened in Tucson, they must be held responsible for doing what they can to make certain Tucson does not happen again.”
Fox’s Ailes did give an interview the following week, saying he had told his personalities to “tone it down,” adding that he hoped “the other side does that” too.
But even Robert Greenwald, who made the highly critical documentary, “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” about Fox News in 2004 and sees himself as having passed the Fox-critiquing torch on to liberal organizations like Media Matters, understands why the president is doing the interview, even if he doesn’t approve.
“It’s an effort to reach the largest possible audience, which will be more than a Fox audience at that particular time. So I understand the tactic in terms of wanting to reach that audience,” Greenwald said. “If I were president, I wouldn’t make that decision. It’s looking for a short-term ability to reach some more eyeballs, but it will cost them in the long term because it gives further credence and further support to Fox.”
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