Sage Steele says ESPN handed her 'script' ahead of Biden interview
In an interview with Fox News Digital, former ESPN host Sage Steele said her bosses ordered her to go off a ‘script’ during her 2021 interview with President Biden.
Former ESPN broadcaster Keith Olbermann took a swipe at Sage Steele on social media on Wednesday after Steele revealed her 2021 interview with President Biden was "scripted" by network executives.
Olbermann responded to a headline from Awful Announcing on X.
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"Of COURSE it was scripted. If it hadn't have been @sagesteele – the dumbest person I've ever worked with in sports or news – couldn't have gotten through it," Olbermann wrote.
Keith Olbermann speaks onstage at the ESPN portion of the Summer Television Critics Association tour in Beverly Hills, California, on July 24, 2013. (Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images)
Olbermann pointed to one part of Steele’s interview with Fox News Digital in which she said "every single question was scripted, gone over dozens of times by many editors and executives."
"I mean Jesus, if this happened to you, you'd just assume it WASN'T being done to protect the network from you humiliating it – and yourself?" Olbermann wrote.
Riley Gaines, who had been the target of Olbermann’s ire in the past, defended Steele.
"Sage has the balls that @KeithOlbermann lacks. This picture will be the bane of his existence," Gaines wrote on X.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, Steele recalled the "structured" nature of the pre-taped interview, so much so that her ESPN bosses handed her a "script" to go off of.
"Sage has the balls that @KeithOlbermann lacks," Riley Gaines wrote in defense of Sage Steele. (Getty Images)
"That was an interesting experience in its own right because it was so structured," Steele said. "And I was told, ‘You will say every word that we write out, you will not deviate from the script and go.’"
Many of the questions Steele asked Biden in the March 2021 interview pertained to sports leagues attempting to restore normalcy during the COVID pandemic and vaccine hesitancy among athletes and fans. Her interview made headlines at the time when Biden supported the MLB's All-Star game boycott of Atlanta following the passage of Georgia's election reform law.
But everything Steele said to the president ultimately came from ESPN's c-suite.
"To the word. Every single question was scripted, gone over dozens of times by many editors and executives. Absolutely. I was on script and was told not to deviate," Steele told Fox News Digital. "It was very much ‘This is what you will ask. This is how you will say it. No follow-ups, no follow-ups. Next.' … This went up to the fourth floor, as we said, where all the bosses, the top executives, the decision makers are, the president of our company, the CEO, where they all worked."
"SportsCenter" host Sage Steele is suing ESPN for allegedly violating her free speech rights. (Meg Oliphant/Getty Images)
Steele said she didn't know for certain whether ESPN sent the questions to the White House in advance of the interview but seemed confident that is "what happened."
ESPN declined to comment.
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Steele has since left ESPN. She launched a podcast called "The Sage Steele Show."
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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