A former ESPN host who interviewed Joe Biden in 2021 is now saying the entire interview was ‘scripted to the word’ by network executives and that she was forbidden from asking follow-ups.
Sage Steele, who formerly hosted ESPN’s SportsCenter and worked for the network for 16 years, revealed her bosses at the time of the interview carefully crafted each of her questions.
She claims she was handed a script by her ESPN boss and was threatened not to drift from what the executives had written for her to say.
‘I was told, ‘You will say every word that we write out, you will not deviate from the script,” she told Fox News.
‘To the word. Every single question was scripted, gone over dozens of times by many editors and executives,’ she continued. ‘I was on script and was told not to deviate.’
‘It was very much ‘This is what you will ask. This is how you will say it. No follow-ups.”
‘This went up to the fourth floor, as we said, where all the bosses, the top executives, the decision makers are, the president of our company, the CEO, where they all worked,’ she continued.
Though Steele is unsure whether ESPN sent the scripted questions to the Biden administration in advance, she expressed that she was confident that’s ‘what happened.’
ESPN declined to comment.
Hellbound and Down 