Philadelphia radio host resigns after admitting she used campaign’s questions in Biden interview

A Philadelphia radio station host has “mutually agreed to part ways” with her employer after she accepted prewritten questions from President Joe Biden’s campaign, according to WURD President Sara Lomax.

Host Andrea Lawful-Sanders’s actions stirred controversy as Biden faces accusations across the political spectrum of age-related problems and the White House has sought to cover it up with advanced planning and restricted interviews. The interview was Biden’s first following the debate on June 27.

“The interview featured pre-determined questions provided by the White House, which violates our practice of remaining an independent media outlet accountable to our listeners,” Lomax said in a statement. “As a result, Ms. Lawful-Sanders and WURD Radio have mutually agreed to part ways, effective immediately.”

In a Facebook post captioned, “The time has come for me to move on…,” Lawful-Sanders said she tendered her resignation on Saturday. “It was accepted,” she said of her resignation. “I most sincerely wanted to thank the listening audience.”

On Saturday, Lawful-Sanders told CNN’s Victor Blackwell on First of All that Biden’s team sent her several questions and she chose four of them to ask the president. Lawful-Sanders arranged and negotiated the interview independently of WURD, a black-owned talk radio station.

Generally, accepting questions provided to journalists from campaigns or political candidates is a bad journalistic practice. It can make it more difficult for a journalist to obtain unscripted answers from an interviewee rather than off-the-cuff responses, which may be more genuine.

Lomax insisted that “WURD Radio is not a mouthpiece for the Biden or any other Administration.”

“Internally, we will commit to reviewing our policies, procedures, and practices to reinforce WURD’s independence and trust with our listeners. But mainstream media should do its own introspection to explore how they have lost the trust of so many Americans, Black Americans chief among them,” Lomax said.

As the Biden campaign faces other accusations of scripting the president’s actions, such as its photo preparation of a precise path to a podium, Lawful-Sanders’s predetermined questions added to the fire.

Despite having an opportunity to think about his responses in advance, Biden slipped up during the interview, saying, “I’m proud to be, as I said, the first vice president, first black woman to serve with a black president, proud to have been involved with the first black woman on the Supreme Court.”

Biden campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said the campaign does “not condition interviews on acceptance of these questions, and hosts are always free to ask the questions they think will best inform their listeners.”

The Biden campaign said it will not suggest questions for future interviews.

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Biden will likely face more calls to step down this week as congressional Democrats meet in the House and Senate.

If he steps down, he’ll be the first president since former President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968 to decide not to run for reelection.