Biden skipping Super Bowl pregame interview with Fox News

President Biden will not sit for an interview with Fox News meant to air during the Super Bowl pregame show, The Post has confirmed.

“We offered an interview with our top news anchors with no strings attached,” a FNC exec told Variety, which first reported on the White House stiff-arm. “They’re walking away from a huge audience and it’s a major missed opportunity.” 

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed in a Twitter post that the administration planned on doing an interview with Fox Soul, a streaming service catering to black audiences run by Fox Television Stations — a separate entity from Fox News Media. 

“We’ve been informed that Fox Corp has asked for the interview to be cancelled.” Jean-Pierre said. 

The press secretary’s claim defies credibility since Biden recorded an interview with “NBC Nightly News” anchor Lester Holt ahead of last year’s game between the Los Angeles Rams and Cincinnati Bengals. In 2021, Biden sat down with “CBS Evening News” host Norah O’Donnell ahead of the Super Bowl between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs.

A presidential interview has been a feature of nearly every Super Bowl telecast since Barack Obama took office in 2009.

In 2018, Donald Trump refused NBC’s request to be interviewed ahead of the matchup between the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles after controversially criticizing players who refused to stand for the national anthem earlier in the season.

In contrast to CBS and NBC, which have used newsreaders to handle the interviews, Fox has always tapped one of its popular opinion hosts to grill the commander-in-chief. Bill O’Reilly sat down with Obama in 2011 and 2014 and conducted the first Super Bowl interview with Trump, now 76, in 2017.

The last time Fox aired the Super Bowl, in February 2020, Sean Hannity took command of the pregame one-on-one with the then-commander-in-chief.

According to Variety, the top contenders to interview Biden this time around were “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream or FNC chief political anchor Bret Baier, who also hosts the network’s “Special Report” newscast weekdays at 6 p.m.

Regardless of who conducted the interview, Biden could have expected to get questions about a number of fraught topics — including congressional investigations involving his son Hunter’s business interests, his mishandling of classified documents going back to his time as a senator, and his handling of a Chinese spy balloon that was allowed to drift across US airspace for almost a full week before being shot down Feb. 4. 

Biden has conducted few interviews compared with his predecessors to this point in his term of office, but did sit down this week with “PBS NewsHour” correspondent Judy Woodruff as well as “Noticias Telemundo” anchor Julio Vaqueiro.

Fox News Media and Fox Television Stations are subsidiaries of Fox Corporation. The chairman of Fox Corp., Rupert Murdoch, is the executive chairman of News Corporation, the parent company of The Post.