Broadcast networks broken into regular programming Sunday afternoon to cover the news that President Joe Biden has decided to drop out of the race for re-election.
A few minutes after 2 p.m. ET, NBC News senior Washington correspondent Hallie Jackson reported on the news during a special report. She was joined during the report by Kristen Welker, Kelly O'Donnell, Yamiche Alcindor and Allie Raffa.
O’Donnell talked about how the pressure had been mounting on Biden.
“To be the president running for reelection, you are, in fact, the standard bearer of that party — and the bough had been breaking for days, crack by crack, now with roughly 40 elected members of Congress and the Democratic Party urging him to step aside,” she said.
Jen Psaki, who had been President Biden's press secretary, broke the news on MSNBC at 1:52 p.m.
“This is a significant breaking news development with the president announcing he is stepping back from the race," Psaki said. “There was very little indication from people close to him and many people in the campaign that this was what was about to happen, as much as there were reports of Democrats calling on him to do that.”
MSNBC’s coverage was joined by Rachel Maddow and Joe Scarborough.
Fox News Channel said it would present continuous coverage of Biden’s decision on Sunday. Fox's chief Washington Correspondent Mike Emanuel broad the news on air and was joined by Bret Baier, Brit Hume, Martha MacCallum, Bill Hemmer and Shannon Bream.
“This is a tectonic shift in politics, think about where we have been and in such a fast time to have changed now this nominee, stepping down," Baier said on Fox News. "It was only three weeks ago that there was that debate and at which point President Biden walked out and in the first few minutes, the world kind of gasped that was on stage after all the preparation that he did. The fallout from that I don’t think ever really recovered and his effort to do interviews afterwards did not stop the bleeding as far as his political problems.“
Cable news rival CNN was airing a rerun of Fareed Zakaria GPS when the news broke, and at 1:46 p.m. and it took about 10 minutes to report the breaking news, according to the Daily Beast.
