At 1:46 p.m. on Sunday, President Joe Biden announced his historic decision to end his re-election campaign. At 1:46 p.m. on Sunday, CNN was in the middle of a Fareed Zakaria GPS rerun.
The network did not cut to news coverage of the president’s decision until 1:57 p.m., with chief national security correspondent Alex Marquardt filling in for resident weekend anchor Fredricka Whitfield. On MSNBC, current anchor and former White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced the news at 1:53 p.m. in the middle of her show, an ironic twist for MSNBC after years of interweaving former Biden aides into the network.
The odd pairings reflect how Biden’s announcement, which reporting indicated could come this weekend despite the White House’s denials, caught networks entirely flat-footed. All the major cable networks, including Fox News, did not feature their primetime anchors announcing the pivotal news, with some scrambling to swap out different hosts in the minutes after the announcement.
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Even the broadcast networks were slow to react. NBC and CBS broke the news at 2:02 p.m., while ABC trailed them snail-like at 2:04 p.m.
Some of the networks eventually began to weave their stars in. CNN brought on The Source anchor Kaitlan Collins to report out her phone call with former President Donald Trump, who attacked Biden as “the worst president in the history of our country.” Collins eventually assumed lead anchor duties an hour later, and MSNBC swapped out Psaki minutes later for weekday anchor Katy Tur, one of the network’s faces for objectively delivering news.
Other networks seemed to have some guests on reserve. NewsNation, for example, interviewed former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
