Should Joe Biden Even Bother Talking To Fox News?

For a Democratic presidential candidate like Joe Biden, there are few gambits as simultaneously cut-and-dried — while also as fraught with peril and potentially embarrassing — as the decision of whether or not to submit to an interview with a Fox News journalist.

Is the network too nakedly partisan, too overtly conservative-leaning, for a Democrat to even bother engaging with? Or does a candidate need to take the plunge, regardless, realizing that to pass up the opportunity is to not only shut out the biggest audience of TV news consumers — but to let the network’s opinion journalists continue to define the candidate for viewers, unchecked?

As if all that wasn’t enough to consider, there’s also the omnipresent Trump factor. Fox’s Sean Hannity and the president are longtime friends, and Trump has also been touting his imminent “return” to the Fox & Friends morning show as a regular call-in guest. In his new book “Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth,” the host of CNN’s Reliable Sources Brian Stelter writes about the network thus: “Trump’s entanglement with Fox has no historical precedent. Never before has a TV network effectively produced the president’s intelligence briefing and staffed the federal bureaucracy. Never before has a president promoted a single TV channel, asked the hosts for advice behind closed doors, and demanded for them to be fired when they step out of line. This story has all the makings of a farcical drama: a dysfunctional White House, a delusional president, and a drama-filled network misinforming him from morning through night.”

All of which is to say, a Democrat like Biden might be inclined to wonder what possible gain there is to be had from stepping into that maw, while the klieg lights illuminate for millions of pro-Trump viewers a candidate trying to shake loose the manacles of a pre-existing narrative. These are perfectly natural, rational questions to ask — and how they get answered is as much a media story as it is a hint about what kind of a president Joe Biden might be, assuming he beats Trump at the polls in November.

Biden, at least as of the time of this writing, has so far declined overtures from Fox News journalists to be interviewed by them on-air — not that his refusal has caused the invitations to dry up. On the contrary, Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace told viewers back at the end of July, after he’d been rebuffed for an interview by Biden’s camp, that the interview requests for the former Vice President wouldn’t stop (“We’ll keep asking”).

You could argue that Biden up to this point has run a campaign that leaves no room for this big of a media gamble. That he and his strategists are first and foremost trying to maximize whatever the political equivalent is of the Hippocratic Oath, even though there’s just a shade of difference between trying to do no harm and a candidate seeming to be “hiding in the basement,” as Trump likes to taunt his rival. 

Moreover, navigating this perennial election-season briar patch means different things to different Democratic candidates. Hillary Clinton, for example, submitted to interviews with Fox journalists multiple times during her 2016 race.

“There are some Fox platforms one can go on and not lose their dignity,” former Hillary Clinton advisor Philippe Reines told The Daily Beast recently.

That’s an allusion to some of the network’s broadcast talent like Wallace as well as Neil Cavuto, who’ve both pushed back hard against Trump at times — Wallace even going so far as to denigrate the difficulty level of a cognitive test that Trump took. And he did so to the president’s face, no less.

But you could also argue that Reines’ comment somewhat naively ignores — well, the passage of time, in a way. And how much more entrenched the two warring halves of the country’s political world keep getting, from one year to the next. 

In the final analysis, it may be that the only reason for a Democrat to consent to a Fox News interview is because of a belief in the number of “persuadables” out there. The fact that President Trump’s poll numbers are as high as they are — in the face of record unemployment, a raging pandemic, around 200,000 Americans dead, a moribund economy, racial unrest and more — is the kind of thing that could lead some people to conclude that Americans have pretty much picked their “teams,” and that’s that. Which would mean that there’s almost nothing President Trump could do, for example, to bleed enough support to make any difference.

Unless you’re convinced enough people can be persuaded to switch teams, as it were.

A former top aide to Gen. James Mattis, Trump’s first defense secretary, told me he thinks this persuadable group in the middle is bigger than you’d think. People like him still believe that those swing voters who the press say everything hinges on every four years — that they still exist, at scale, even in the age of Trump.

This is why Biden campaign surrogates like senior advisor Symone Sanders and communications director Kate Bedingfield have been making appearances on Fox in the absence of, well, the boss. But an eventual decision by the man himself to sit for an interview with a Fox personality? Bet on it happening, eventually. And when it does, it could be read as a sign that the former veep is willing to look past the assumptions associated with conventional wisdom. And that he can be convinced there may be a chance of swaying the most outwardly partisan among us, even in a setting as unfriendly to Biden as the TV network that was so key to Trump’s victory in the first place.