There will be a huge viewership for today’s Super Bowl today — and also a huge viewership for an interview Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly will have with President Barack Obama. It’ll be high viewership — and high stakes for each of them.
The Politico frames the interview this way:
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.”
The Politico notes that Obama general stays away from appearing on ideological cable shows, although he did sit down with Jon Stewart.
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.
But Obama could have declined and perhaps here is one more reason why he didn’t.
As I’ve often noted here — even in posts in which I have criticized him — O’Reilly is a different kind of personality than usually appears on talk radio or cable talk or cable ideological news shows. O’Reilly was an excellent mainstream media broadcast reporter in the 1970s and 1980s when he worked as a news reporter for local television stations and for CBS News and ABC News. From 1991 to 1995, he anchored the entertainment news program Inside Edition, taking the first big step out of traditional news, but still showing his considerable reporting and anchor skills on the air (and assertiveness off the air). He then moved to Fox News and reinvented himself with political schtick, calling his Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor” (sort-of-like if I called this blog Gandelmanland) — now is the highest rated program on cable in the U.S.
In moving to Fox and a persona distinct from his old, traditional media one, O’Reilly is now in total control. If he gets upset with someone or a news source or news rival, he can go on the attack unrelentlessly, pleasing his fans and coming across as yet one more TV talk/news personality who talks from the bile gut rather than the professional journalistic brain. But that is an incorrect assessment.
On some key occasions he does interviews (or specials on Fox) displaying his top notch abilities as a reporter, asking tough questions but also trying to get answers as opposed to trying to use a guest as device for showmanship or to promote a political viewpoint.
Sean Hannity resembles a hired operative of the GOP doing rip-n-read RNC talking points more than even an ideological talk show host. Glenn Beck is on Fox News, but 20 years ago he and his show would have been relegated to a UHF after midnight slot as one of those right wing nutcase shows that had minimum viewership. Today, Beck’s viewership is reportedly eroding.
O’Reilly is sort of like a blogger who had been a journalist or editor – – gleefully freed from the constraints of corporate news restrictions or a micromanaging superior breathing down his neck, free to say what he wants, ask what he wants, or lose his temper without anyone to question him. With his 9 big-selling books and whopping ratings he is a one man industry. But like in politics the long range question is: can he expand his “base,” does he work to just keep his base or can he lose some of his base?
But he has often shown how he can put his seeming talk show host schtick aside and slip back right back into his mainstream network reporter mode — trying to seriously elicit answers from an interview subject to extract answers to complete an unfinished picture. He may have his views (and does) but on those occasions he’s back as a working reporter trying to get answers not make a political proclamation.
This is to his credit. And it perhaps explains why Sarah Palin is more inclined to go on Sean Hannity than on O’Reilly these days. She can count on Hannity to ask “the right” questions but not entirely trust O’Reilly.
So the question tonight will be whether O’Reilly continues to showcase this part of his “brand” that distinguishes him from some others on Fox.
And for Obama? He’s going into the lion’s den. But aside from having a huge audience in general he has chance to show himself in a way to Fox viewers where he’s not defined by Hannity, Beck et. al. through their ideological political filter.
Expect O’Reilly to ask tough questions. This won’t be Hannity interviewing Palin. And expect Obama to be ready for them. He has never been anyone to be unprepared when a huge spotlight is shining.
Big ratings. Big opportunities for both in terms of image.
Will one go in a direction no one expects? Will either come out of this with an image change?
Stay tuned.
Literally.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.