NBC News announced Tuesday that NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt will sit down with President Biden on Thursday for the traditional Super Bowl interview. Highlights from their taped sit-down in Virginia will air on Thursday’s broadcast of Nightly News, and of course during the Super Bowl LVI Pregame Show Sunday, Feb. 13 on NBC.
Last year’s Super Bowl aired on CBS, and Evening News anchor Norah O’Donnell got the Super Bowl interview with Pres. Biden.
A televised interview featuring the President on Super Bowl Sunday has become an annual tradition, going back to 2004 when CBS Sports’ Jim Nantz sat down with then President George W. Bush before the big game. The live interviews continued with President Obama. However, they became taped once Donald Trump took office. Trump’s first Super Bowl interview, with then-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, took place in 2017. He broke off the tradition in 2018, but sat down with CBS’ Margaret Brennan in 2019 and Fox News’ Sean Hannity in 2020.
NBC last had rights to the Super Bowl in 2018, but the news division was not granted an interview with Trump. His refusal to sit down with NBC stemmed from anger over a 2017 interview he did with Lester Holt, during which Trump told the veteran NBC newsman that when he fired FBI Director James Comey, “I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” The interview gave prosecutors in the Mueller investigation yet another reason to think Trump had sought to obstruct justice, and Trump later claimed NBC was “fudging” the tape to make him look bad.
This marks Biden’s first sit-down interview of 2022 and his first since marking one year in office. It also marks Holt’s first Super Bowl interview.