A Wisconsin radio network said Thursday that it edited a recent interview with President Biden at the request of his campaign, a choice it said did not meet listeners’ expectations for journalistic standards.
Civic Media said it became aware 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 on July 3 and aired the following day.
In a statement, the company said that it learned on Monday that “immediately after the phone interview was recorded, the Biden campaign called and asked for two edits to the recording before it aired.” The company, which operates 20 progressive radio stations throughout Wisconsin, said it immediately began investigating the matter “given the gravity of the current political movement.”
Lauren Hitt, a Biden campaign spokeswoman, did not directly respond to questions about the edits or whether it had asked other programs to alter interviews with the president after the fact. In a statement, Ms. Hitt said that “hosts have always been free to ask the questions and air the segments they think will best inform their listeners.”
In addition to Mr. Ingram, several other hosts and producers of radio programs told The New York Times that they had used prescreened 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 was given questions by the campaign before an interview.
Four radio hosts reached by The Times on Thursday said they had not received requests from the Biden campaign to make changes to their interviews after recording. “No revisions were 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 to “have more Blacks in my administration than any other president, all other presidents combined, and in major 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 clip, Mr. Biden briefly discussed former President Donald J. Trump’s past statements about the death penalty in connection to the Central Park Five, a group of five Black and Hispanic men who were wrongly convicted of rape in New York in the late 1980s.
“I don’t know if they even call for their hanging or not, but he — but they said […] convicted of murder,” the president said in the interview. Both edited clips have been put back in the online version of the interview, Civic Media said.
The company’s investigation found that Mr. Ingram and his team “viewed the edits as non-substantive,” a decision it disagreed with. Although it said it “unequivocally stands behind Earl Ingram and his team,” Civic Media said it was conducting a review of his show based on its code of ethics and standards.
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