Since leaving ESPN last summer, Sage Steele has become a regular guest on Fox News.
And on Tuesday, the former SportsCenter anchor opened up regarding her 2021 interview with President Joe Biden, which she says she didn’t have much input into.
“That was an interesting experience in its own right because it was so structured. And I was told, ‘You will say every word that we write out, you will not deviate from the script and go,’” Steele told Fox News Digital. “To the word. Like, every single question was scripted, gone over dozens of times by many editors and executives. Absolutely. 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, no follow-ups. Next.’
“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.”
Steele proceeded to imply that the scripting of the questions was the result of the 46th president’s mental acuity, which has been one of Republicans’ primary talking points heading into the 2024 election.
“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 told Fox News Digital. “I’m not even looking at this from a political angle or my beliefs in anything. This is the human side of it. And when someone is struggling, we allow them to continue to be in the spotlight and put them out there in the first place when they knew there were issues?”
While it’s notable — if not expected — that executives would be heavily involved in an interview with a sitting president, Steele seems to be making her own leap as to the reasoning why. It’s also worth noting that early-2021 remained an especially trying time in the United States politically and socially and it’s hardly surprising that ESPN — or Disney — would want to be careful with the interview.
As for Biden’s involvement, Steele admitted she wasn’t sure whether he had been sent the questions that would be asked in the interview ahead of time but seemed to suspect he had been. ESPN declined to comment on the matter when reached by Fox News.
Knowing what we know now about Steele’s political leanings just two years later, it’s almost surprising that ESPN selected her to conduct the interview (and perhaps that’s another reason why the network would have wanted her to stick to a script). Or maybe it wasn’t Biden’s mental state they were worried about and they were actually concerned Steele might have confused Biden with Joe Rogan.
[Fox News]
