Former ESPN host Sage Steele says a 2021 conversation with Biden was tightly scripted.
Former ESPN host Sage Steele says a 2021 conversation with Biden was tightly scripted.
W hat do you call an interview where the interviewer cannot ask spontaneous follow-up questions?
Not an “interview,” that’s for sure.
But that’s apparently what we got in 2021 when former ESPN host Sage Steele “interviewed” President Biden, according to none other than Steele herself.
“That was an interesting experience in its own right because it was so structured,” she said recently in an interview with Fox News Digital. “And I was told, ‘You will say every word that we write out, you will not deviate from the script and go.’”
The way she tells it, it was more than just the heavy-handed involvement of overly anxious network executives. Steele suggests the White House itself directly oversaw the interview questions, approving what could be asked. She suggested further that the White House was heavily involved because it does not trust the president, who will be 82 this year, to go off script.
In other words, not only wasn’t it an interview, it wasn’t even a one-on-one. It was apparently a network anchor simply reciting a White House–approved script, to which the president responded with White House–approved answers.
Whom does this serve? The interviewee and no one else.
The focus of Steele’s conversation with Biden, which aired in March, two months after the president was inaugurated, was the intersection of Covid-19 mitigation efforts, vaccine mandates, and professional sports. Biden also used the occasion of the ESPN appearance to support the successful attempt to have Major League Baseball move the All-Star Game out of Atlanta in objection to Georgia’s voter-integrity laws.
Steele departed ESPN in August 2023, nearly 16 years after joining the network. Her exit followed a row over the company’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate, which she publicly criticized as “sick” and “scary.” ESPN responded by removing Steele from on-air programming. She quit soon after that. Steele has since brought a lawsuit against ESPN, alleging the company violated her free-speech rights.
For her 2021 conversation with Biden, Steele claims ESPN executives scripted everything so tightly that she could not press the president on anything he said, even to clarify his meaning.
“To the word,” she alleges. “Every single question was scripted, gone over dozens of times by many executives . . . editors and executives.”
Steele added, “It was very much, ‘This is what you will ask. This is how you will say it. No follow-ups, no follow-ups. Next.’”
No follow-ups means it was not an interview. It was something, but not an interview.
“I knew this was a lot bigger than just the wonderful editors I worked with,” she continued. “This went up to the fourth floor, . . . where all the bosses, the top executives, the decision makers are, the president of our company, the CEO.”
Now, ESPN is not the New York Times or the Washington Post, so this isn’t quite a news-media scandal. Yet one cannot help but ask: What was the point? What was the purpose of ESPN hosting Biden if not to serve as an unofficial arm of the White House communications office? For that matter, just how involved was the White House anyway? Does the executive branch often co-opt major media organizations to pump out party propaganda? For her part, Steele alleged top-down involvement from the White House. Though she clarified she isn’t certain ESPN executives sent the questions verbatim to the White House ahead of the sit-down, she is confident that is “what happened.”
“I think it’s really heartbreaking that the people who love Joe Biden and say they truly care about him have allowed it to get to this point,” Steele said. “So, I’m not even looking at this from a political angle or my beliefs in anything. This is the human side of it.”
If Biden’s people know putting him “in the spotlight” will only expose his “issues,” she said, then why do it?
“Of course, they had to know,” she added.
“So, it’s a humanity thing with me where I don’t care where anyone stands and what they vote for or who they believe in. Do you really care about that person? As a father, as a husband, as an everything,” Steele said.
If Steele’s version of events is correct, ESPN was used for pro bono public relations. Do ESPN and its parent company often allow themselves to be used in this manner by the White House? Whom does this serve other than a coterie of powerful officials in the nation’s capital? And are we supposed to accept this as something normal? Worse, if we’re to believe Steele, not even the White House trusts Biden to speak for himself — and that goes back to his first few months in office. That’s just grand.
It’s not a sign of anything positive that a media organization allegedly collaborated with partisan officials to promote a favored narrative. It’s a sign of even worse things that this apparently happened because the president’s handlers don’t trust him not to show his age in front of cameras.