A former ESPN anchor who interviewed Joe Biden in 2021 now says the entire interview was “scripted from the word” by network executives and that she was prohibited from asking follow-up questions.
Sage Steele, who previously hosted ESPN’s SportsCenter and worked for the network for 16 years, revealed that her bosses had carefully crafted all of her questions at the time of the interview.
She claims she was given a script by her ESPN boss and threatened not to deviate from what executives had written to her.
“I was told, ‘You will say every word we write out, you will not deviate from the script,'” she told Fox news.
‘On the word. “Every question was written and reviewed dozens of times by many editors and executives,” she continued. “I was on the script and was told not to deviate.”
Former ESPN host Sage Steele (left) claimed in a recent Fox News report that her bosses carefully crafted a script for her to follow during her 2021 interview with President Joe Biden. She says she was told not to deviate from the script at all and to read it “from the word.”
Steele later left ESPN after a legal battle in which she claimed the network had violated her First Amendment protections
‘It was a lot’ This is what you will ask. This is how you will say it. No follow-up actions.”
“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.
While Steele is unsure whether ESPN sent the scripted questions to the Biden administration in advance, she said she was confident that is “what happened.”
ESPN declined to comment.
She also revealed how heartbroken she was about the president’s mental state after her interaction with him.
“I think it’s really heartbreaking that the people who love Joe Biden and say they really 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 from my beliefs in anything. This is the human side of it.”
“And if someone is having a hard time, do we let them stay in the spotlight and put them there in the first place if they knew there were problems? Of course they had to know.’
‘So for me it’s a humanity issue where I don’t care where someone stands and what he or she votes for or who he or she believes in. Do you really care about that person? As a father, as a husband, as everything.”
The new admissions about the infamous interview are not the first to be revealed by the former ESPN host.
She previously called Biden a “terrible president” on TV host Bill Maher’s Club Random podcast and recounted several awkward off-camera interactions with Biden during the 2021 interview.
“Well, what he started doing, of course he has someone next to him, and they keep a black curtain over the camera lens, so you can’t see him until the last second, but you can hear him, and we’re chatting… So I can hear him, and he says, ‘What is this for?’… And he says, ‘Who am I talking to? Wait, what’s her name?”
According to Steele, Biden talked about how he used to play football and proudly claimed, “I have the best hands.”
Steele added, “What do you say?”
She also said that after that joke, the president’s voice died and he told her, “Um, never mind.”
Since leaving ESPN, Steele has created her own podcast called The Sage Steele Show, which is produced by Maher’s Club Random Studios.
She settled a lawsuit with ESPN last fall after accusing her former employer of violating her free speech protections.