President Joe Biden isn’t the only man who will be scrutinized when he sits down for a television interview on Friday. Every word by his interviewer, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, will be evaluated, too.
It’s no exaggeration to say that this is the most important interview of Stephanopoulos’s long and distinguished career.
Will he focus on Biden’s health? The facts relating to last week’s disaster of a debate in Atlanta? The recent reporting about how his frailties affect his ability to govern?
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Observers have a lot of questions about the questioning: What tone will Stephanopoulos strike? How forcefully will he follow up if Biden dodges?
This matters because Biden’s presidency is on the line. Many Americans believe he is not fit to serve. The June 27 debate deepened the festering fears about his candidacy and forced a reckoning inside the Democratic Party. Biden’s team, knowing every TV network was desperate for an interview, chose ABC, and specifically Stephanopoulos, who has known Biden for decades.
Stephanopoulos has been on both sides of this kind of crisis. In 1992, he was the communications director for Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. (More on that in a moment.) After four years in the Clinton White House, he transferred his political experience to television as a political analyst and gradually became one of the nation’s best-known broadcasters.
I have known Stephanopoulos for years. In 2013, I wrote a book about his longtime television home, “Good Morning America.” Though he helps millions of people wake up in the mornings, his true passion is political news. So I know he is all too aware of the stakes of this Biden interview.
Consider: It is Biden’s first national news interview since the debate. And it will be among the few times the public will have seen Biden in an unscripted setting in several weeks. Many Democrats have already decided that Biden should be replaced at the top of the ticket. Others are waiting to see how he performs in the interview.
The White House, incredibly, is leaning into this dynamic, almost casting Biden-Stephanopoulos as a televised cognitive test. On Tuesday, less than an hour after ABC announced the interview booking, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre cited the interview repeatedly when reporters at a White House briefing pressed for answers about the president’s health.
ABC said on Tuesday that the interview would be taped on Friday, at a Biden campaign stop in Wisconsin, and televised bit by bit, with a “first look” on Friday evening, an additional clip on Saturday morning, and the “extended interview” on Sunday’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and Monday’s “GMA.” But the release timeline accelerated as pressure on the president intensified. ABC said Wednesday that the entire interview will air Friday at 8 p.m. — making the Biden sit-down a prime-time special. ABC also specified that “a transcript of the unedited interview will be made available the same day.”
The network’s rollout plan recognizes the fact that many Americans distrust both Biden and ABC. Any appearance of editing will engender further speculation that news outlets have hidden Biden’s infirmity from the public. (That charge is baseless. There has been thorough coverage of Biden’s health by many media outlets. However, the stories should have been tougher; the TV segments could have been louder.)
The last time Stephanopoulos interviewed Biden, during the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, ABC also released the full transcript, and though it showed that the televised interview was trimmed because of time constraints, the edits didn’t make Biden look any better or worse. Stephanopoulos repeatedly challenged Biden and Biden rigorously pushed back, occasionally stumbling his way through sentences but mostly presenting a powerful defense of his administration.
Americans want to know if Biden has declined considerably since then. The debate suggested that he has. Importantly, Stephanopoulos is in a very different position than the CNN debate moderators were in: Because there is no other debater present, Stephanopoulos is free to play the roles of devil’s advocate, voter surrogate and fact-checker.
Like the CNN moderators, though, he will have to accept the likelihood that some partisans, on the left or right, or maybe both, will come away angry at him. He will be thinking about a few different audiences: The viewing public at large; his colleagues at ABC and its parent company, Disney; and officials in the Democratic and Republican parties. It’s worth keeping in mind that ABC has a debate between Biden and former President Donald Trump slated for September. It is the only other scheduled Biden-Trump debate, and it’s anyone’s guess if it will happen.
But Stephanopoulos can’t, and won’t, let ABC’s desire to protect a debate shape his interview. He has clearly established journalistic bona fides — from the time he questioned then-President George W. Bush about nuclear proliferation in 2006 to the time he grilled then-President Barack Obama about the rollout of the Affordable Care Act in 2013. In recent years, Stephanopoulos has been exceedingly tough on Republican allies of Trump who have promoted Trump’s election lies. He has not hesitated to ask a question over and over again when necessary.
Some Republican activists have defaulted to conspiracy thinking about the interview, citing his Clinton White House history and imagining that he is coming to Biden’s rescue with preapproved questions and censored answers. Having worked at CNN, one of ABC’s rivals, for almost a decade, I know that’s not true. Network interviewers don’t submit questions to presidential campaigns in advance. (The questions for Biden are obvious, anyway. Will you take a thorough medical exam and release the results? How will you win back your own party?) The dynamic between networks and administrations is much more hostile than outsiders often think.
But the fact that Stephanopoulos has been on both sides might benefit him this time around. As he wrote in his memoir, “All Too Human,” he knows what politicians are thinking and feeling when their entire world is crumbling around them.
During Clinton’s primary campaign in 1992, Gennifer Flowers alleged a 12-year affair with Clinton, and the controversy could have ended the candidate’s career. “Our situation was so serious,” Stephanopoulos wrote, “that the only hope was the media equivalent of experimental chemotherapy. 60 Minutes was strong enough to cure us — if it didn’t kill us first.”
The interview is mainly remembered today for Hillary Clinton’s staunch defense of her husband. Stephanopoulos was the only campaign staffer in the room when it was taped. And, he recalled in the book, it worked: The Clintons’ message was “what’s past is past; it’s time to move on.”
Biden will want to demonstrate his cognitive skills and, like the Clintons, move on. What will Stephanopoulos want?
Brian Stelter is the author of three books about the media industry, a former media reporter at the New York Times and a former anchor of CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”
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