Two radio hosts say President Biden’s team provided them with questions ahead of their respective interviews with the president on July 4.
Andrea Lawful-Sanders, host of The Source on WURD in Philadelphia, and Earl Ingram of The Earl Ingram Show in Waukesha, Wis., told CNN’s Victor Blackwell on Saturday that the questions were given to them by Biden’s campaign aides.
“The questions were sent to me for approval; I approved of them,” Lawful-Sanders said. “I chose questions that were most important to the Black and brown communities we serve in Philadelphia.”
Ingram, who appeared in the same CNN interview with Lawful-Sanders, nodded his head and seemed to not dispute Lawful-Sanders’s experience of how the questions were sent.
Soon after the CNN segment was aired, Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt told the New York Times that it’s “not uncommon” for campaign aides to send over preselected questions to interviewers, stressing that officials “do not condition interviews on acceptance of these questions” by the interviewer and that “hosts are always free to ask the questions they think will best inform their listeners.”