The Philadelphia radio host who conducted the first interview with Joe Biden following the president’s woeful 27 June debate performance has resigned from her job after she admitted she asked the president a handful of questions supplied by his aides.
Andrea Lawful-Sanders said Sunday on Instagram that WURD Radio had accepted her resignation after she tendered it.
In its own statement later Sunday, WURD Radio said that Andrea Lawful-Sanders had arranged the interview “without knowledge, consultation or collaboration with … management” – and violated the station’s editorial independence by accepting questions supplied by Biden’s team.
The outlet, which describes itself as Pennsylvania’s only African American-owned and operated radio station, also said Biden aides’ decision to supply questions to Lawful-Sanders prolonged a historical practice of marginalizing and “de-legitimizing Black voices” in US media.
“WURD Radio is not a mouthpiece for the Biden or any other administration,” said the statement from chief executive officer Sara Lomax, who added that the station would review its policies, procedures and practices to re-establish its “independence and trust … with listeners”.
Sunday’s announcements from WURD and Lawful-Sanders came after she went on the CNN program First of All a day earlier and revealed to host Victor Blackwell that she asked Biden four questions provided to her in advance by the president’s team.
“The questions were sent to me for approval – I approved of them,” said Lawful-Sanders, whose recorded interview with Biden aired on 4 July. “I got several questions – eight of them. And the four that were chosen were the ones that I approved.”
Lawful-Sanders was one of two battleground state radio hosts who aired an interview with Biden on 4 July and described being given questions by the president’s staff ahead of the conversation.
Wisconsin’s Earl Ingram – whose show in Milwaukee has a primarily Black audience – told ABC News on Saturday that Biden’s team supplied him with five questions. He said he asked four of them.
“Yes, I was given some questions for Biden,” Ingram said. He also remarked that the president’s lengthy answers left him little time for follow-ups. “I didn’t get a chance to ask him all the things I wanted,” he said.
In the recent debate against Donald Trump, Biden responded to his presidential predecessor’s rapid-fire delivery of falsehoods with a raspy voice and intermittent inability to complete his train of thought. Some within Biden’s Democratic party responded to his shaky debate performance by calling on him to end his re-election campaign and let another candidate try to defeat Trump, who leads the incumbent in polls despite a criminal conviction in May for falsifying business records in the case involving hush-money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
Detractors of Biden maintain he then underwhelmed in an ABC interview on Friday. But before that session, Biden granted interviews to Lawful-Sanders and Ingram, and it was on their airwaves that he first urged voters to judge him by his time in the White House – not the 90-minute debate in late June.
“I had a bad debate,” Biden told Lawful-Sanders. “But 90 minutes on stage does not erase what I have done in three-and-a-half years.”
Lawful-Sanders on Monday issued a written response to WURD’s statement from the previous day, saying the station allowed her to join in 2019 as an independent contractor despite knowing she was not a journalist. She said she was brought on because of her experience as a radio host – and that it was standard for her to book her own interviews and develop questions for guests without “knowledge, consultation or collaboration from station management”.
She said she adhered to that policy when the White House communications team invited her on 2 July to interview Biden, and that the station was provided with the interview recording before it aired.
“I cannot stress enough that it is not uncommon for high-profile people to submit suggested questions,” she wrote in part in an Instagram post. “We can choose to reject or use them – or to be inspired to include relevant questions based on an intimate understanding of our audience.
“However, I appreciate how this has allowed stakeholders in the media to revisit this industry-wide practice.”