The New York Times-20080128-Fox Mashes Up The Supers

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Fox Mashes Up The Supers

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Fox is going to get an early jump on Super Sunday. At 9 a.m. E.S.T. next Sunday morning -- more than nine hours before the coin is tossed -- players and tactics will be scrutinized, coaches will get the once-over, and sideline savants will predict the outcome.

Except the veterans have names like Clinton and McCain and the rookie phenom under the microscope is called Obama. In a move to super-size an already sprawling day of programming, the News Corporation is mashing up the Super Bowl and Super Tuesday with a blend of its sports and news divisions.

The day will begin with an hour of Fox News Sunday where the host, Chris Wallace, will cover the battle in 22 states two days later as well as the match in Phoenix that night. A two-hour special, with the anchor Shepard Smith -- transplanted from cable to the main network -- as host, will then use reporting from various Fox affiliates around the country to create a blend of football and politics intended to build interest in the respective contests, and not so coincidentally, the Fox brand.

There has been this aligning of planets, said Marty Ryan, executive producer of political programs at Fox News. We have 22 states and two competitive elections. That is the first time that has happened in 50 years and it takes place just two days after the Super Bowl.

Say what you like about Fox, they really know how to make a handoff. Just as American Idol ran interference for the startup of The Moment of Truth, so the Super Bowl will serve as a vigorous lead-in to Super Tuesday. Touch that dial and you might get tackled.

The Super Bowl is one of the last bastions of mass media in a fractured universe, and trust the News Corporation to make the most of it. After starting from scratch in 1986, the Fox network took off in 1993 after intercepting the rights to broadcast N.F.L. games from CBS. Ridiculed at the time as an expensive overreach, the grab has since been returned for many a touchdown. The Super Bowl to Super Tuesday build-out is the same use of leverage, all the more valuable during a writers' strike that has denuded other networks of fresh programming and a heated competition for the political audience, as well.

It is very shrewd and has some journalistic value, said Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism. This is a way of taking a moment when they have attracted a crowd around football and leveraging cable assets along with local stations to create a kind of ad-hoc broadcast news division.

Of course, Fox is often accused of, well, rooting for the home team. Its broadcast will include an interview with George W. Bush, a football fan who once accused the Democrats of prematurely dancing in the end zone and whose vice president described the progress in Afghanistan as three yards and a cloud of dust (although critics might say punted on second down is more apt).

Observers worry that the nation's most hallowed contest will be sullied in the process, but Fox has indicated that it will get most of the hard-core politics out of the way early so that Super Bowl XLII can proceed unmolested.

Fox isn't the only channel threading politics and pigskin. CNN has been calling its Sunday night political broadcasts the Ballot Bowl. All season, NBC spiced up its football broadcasts with Keith Olbermann, an MSNBC anchorman who brought along the form, if not quite the ideological content, of his cable show. (ESPN, burned once by Rush Limbaugh, is still shy.)

How deep does the connection between politics and football go? Walk into the spin zone after any of the presidential debates -- a place of fumbles, Hail Marys and touchdowns -- and you could not be blamed for thinking you'd entered a locker room instead. Super Bowl winners may go to Disney World, but they visit the White House as well, to see the nation's fan-in-chief.

Theodore Roosevelt once tried to ban football as too dangerous. Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford all played at college. Nixon offered play-calling advice to Redskins Coach George Allen and all but crowned a national collegiate football champion in a very contested year, prompting Penn State Coach Joe Paterno to later quip, I often wondered how Nixon could know so much about college football in 1969 and so little about Watergate in 1973.

Jimmy Carter was a Nascar man a bit ahead of his time, while Ronald Reagan not only uttered, Win one for the Gipper, he created his late-career persona in the process.

Bill Clinton, a wonk's wonk, had other interests, but when it came time to refute charges of infidelity involving Gennifer Flowers, he chose the time slot on 60 Minutes just after the Super Bowl. The Bush father and son team are both baseball men, with the senior Bush serving as the captain of the Yale baseball team and the current president gaining a business reputation as one of the owners of the Texas Rangers.

Throughout his career, David Maraniss of The Washington Post has alternated between covering the sporting side of politics and the political aspects of sports. His forthcoming book, Rome 1960: The Olympics That Changed the World, suggests that the nexus between the two can alter world events.

The merger of sports and politics on that Sunday seems like a somewhat pathetic, but inevitable idea, he wrote in an e-mail message. It is just another reminder that everything now meets at the corner of celebrity and television. It used to be nothing more than pols making stupid bets for the hometown teams -- Rudy's pastrami sandwich versus Mitt's Boston clam chowder. Now they are all in the same game: Bill and Hill, Brady and Moss -- what's the difference? ESPN is Fox News is 'Entertainment Tonight.'

Lest football fans feel that their beloved sport is being pulled down by the face mask in the mire of political squabbles, George Carlin pointed out decades ago that they don't call the quarterback a field general for nothing: With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy's defensive line.

Some candidates may pick up enough blocking super delegates to find the end zone. And when the eventual winner goes to the White House, he or she will be shown the president's traveling Armageddon kit (remember: the election decides who will control America's nuclear arsenal). Its nickname? The football.