Two radio hosts who interviewed US President Joe Biden this week said his campaign advisers provided them with lists of questions before conducting the interviews.
The interviews, on radio shows in the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, were the first since Biden’s questionable one-on-one performance with rival Donald Trump on June 27, in which he appeared hesitant and awkward, at times stringing together incoherent sentences.
Earl Ingram, a senior journalist for CivicMedia in Wisconsin, told ABC News that Biden’s aides gave him a list of five questions before the interview, and the president asked four of them.
In addition to Ingram, another anchor who interviewed Biden told CNN he also received a list of questions for the interview.
“We do not require interviewers to accept these questions,” Biden campaign officials said when asked by ABC News. “Interviewers are always free to ask questions that they think will best inform their listeners.”
However, Ingram told ABC, he didn’t necessarily see anything wrong and didn’t feel like adjusting.
“I think the thought of having the opportunity to ask the president of the United States any question is a little more than anyone would expect,” he said.
On CNN, Andrea Lovell Sanders, host of WURD Radio’s The Source, said Biden’s advisers gave her a list of eight questions before her interview with the president and that she agreed to them.
Biden campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt stressed that Lovell Sanders was “free” to ask whatever questions she saw fit and did not make accepting questions a condition of interviews.
Furthermore, he noted that it was common to suggest questions, and stressed that campaign advisers were the ones who sent the questions, not the White House, as some have claimed.
The June 27 debate exposed the 81-year-old US president’s physical and mental weaknesses, prompting many in the Democratic Party to consider changing their candidate for this year’s presidential election.
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