A Wisconsin radio network reported Thursday that it had edited a recent interview with President Biden at the request of his campaign, saying the choice did not meet listeners’ journalistic expectations.
Civic Media said it learned of the changes after the host of “The Earl Ingram Show” revealed that the campaign had given him a list of questions to ask the president during the interview, which was taped July 3 and aired the next day.
In a rackThe company said it learned Monday that “immediately after the call was recorded, the Biden campaign called and requested two edits of the recording before it aired.” The company, which operates 20 progressive radio stations across Wisconsin, said it immediately launched an investigation into the matter “given the gravity of the current political movement.”
Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Biden campaign, did not immediately respond to questions about the edits or whether the program had asked other programs to edit interviews with the president after the fact. In a statement, Ms. Hitt said that “hosts have always been free to ask questions and air the segments they believe will best inform their listeners.”
In addition to Mr. Ingram, several other radio show hosts and producers told The New York Times that they had used pre-screened questions or talking points from the campaign before their own interviews with Mr. Biden. Last week, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, a host at WURD in Philadelphia, resigned after acknowledging that she had been asked questions by the campaign before an interview.
Four radio hosts contacted by The Times on Thursday said they had not received requests from the Biden campaign to make changes to their interviews with the president after the recording. “There were no revisions requested,” said Jessica Williams, who interviewed the president for her afternoon show in Charlotte, N.C., in early March.
The edits to Mr. Ingram’s interview, which were made before the segment aired, removed a total of 16 seconds from the original recording, Civic Media said. In one of those clips, the president claimed that he had “more blacks in his administration than any other president, all other presidents combined, and in key positions, Cabinet positions.”
The White House referred a question about whether Mr. Biden’s statement was accurate to the president’s campaign. Ms. Hitt, the campaign spokeswoman, declined to comment.
In the other edited segment, Biden briefly discussed former President Donald J. Trump’s previous statements on the death penalty in connection with the Central Park Five, a group of five black and Hispanic men who were wrongly convicted of rape in New York City in the late 1980s.
“I don’t know if they even asked for his hanging or not, but he – but they said […] convicted of murder,” the president said in the interview. Both edited clips have been reinstated in the online version of the interview, Civic Media reported.
The company’s investigation found that Mr. Ingram and his team “viewed the edits as not substantive,” a decision the company disagreed with. While the company said it “unequivocally stands behind Earl Ingram and his team,” Civic Media said it conducted a review of his show based on its code of ethics and standards.
