President Biden should have called on Fox News at his press conference last Thursday, former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) said Sunday on the network’s “Media Buzz.”
“Fox, simply by the viewership that it has, should be — when you’re giving 10 questions at a press conference, Fox should be one of them,” Rendell said, when asked by host Howard Kurtz what he thought of Biden not calling on Fox News’s Peter Doocy during the president’s first on-air press conference since taking office.
In a White House press briefing Friday, Doocy put a similar question to White House press secretary Jen Psaki, noting that while the president answers shouted questions from Fox, he never calls on Fox when he has a list in front of him, dating back to the campaign.
The oversight may have simply been a matter of time, Rendell added. But in general, excluding Fox is a mistake, he said.
“I dislike that whenever Democrats do it,” he said. “When we canceled the debate that was supposed to be on Fox for candidates during the primaries, I said publicly, that was a wrong thing to do.”
Also, Rendell said, not all Fox viewers are necessarily antagonistic to Democratic messaging, and the size of their audience makes reaching out to them worth the effort.
“Fox is an important media outlet, and for us to kiss it off and say, ‘we’re not going to support anybody, we don’t want to communicate with anybody who watches Fox’; it’s idiotic as well,” he said. “There are people that watch Fox that are not hard, dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, and you can reach them if you come up with good arguments.”
Fox was not the only major media organization Biden missed in last Thursday’s press conference. He also did not call on The New York Times.