Radio host Andrea Lawful-Sanders has stepped down from WURD after admitting that her post-debate interview with President Joe Biden included questions that had been pre-selected
It’s not just radio interviews like this, it’s late night talk shows too. Everyone knows the questions and answers before they go live.
This journalists problem is that she didn’t have to actually USE the questions, she could have gone her own direction.
How it normally works is the presidents team says:
These are the topics we’d like to talk about.
And those are usually what gets asked about
This time the campaign team provided 8 questions. The host picked four and said she’d ask about those topics.
Then the campaign sent back that those four she had picked were the “approved” questions. So she felt pressured to ask them exactly as approved.
This was (I believe) the only Black owned radio station in the state, and Biden has attacked everyone that’s went against him in the last week. The NY Times can survive that. Small time local news radio can not.
There’s a lot of implicit pressure due to the power imbalance.
