In retrospect, it’s pretty clear that Sage Steele had no business being an ESPN anchor. She was too thoughtful, too principled, and too independent for the job.

Our first sense of this came a few years ago when she spoke out publicly against the COVID-19 vaccine mandate of ESPN’s parent company, Disney. “I respect everyone’s decision,” Steele said at the time, “I really do, but to mandate it is, um, sick.”

It was sick, and it seems even more so with the passage of time.

This week, we got yet another sense that Steele had been selling herself short with ESPN when she shared her account of an all-too-telling interview with Joe Biden in March 2021, just two months into his presidency. It seems that even back then, long before 86% of the American people had come to realize the extent of the president’s cognitive decline, his handlers didn’t trust him to deviate even slightly from a tightly written script.

“That was an interesting experience in its own right,” Steele told Fox News, “because it was so structured. And I was told, ‘You will say every word that we write out, you will not deviate from the script and go.’”

In fact, says Steele, her interview script left nothing to chance. “To the word,” she said. “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. 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.”

Knowing what we now know about the degree of scripting involved in that interview, it’s interesting to go back and watch it anew:

If this was the level of control-freaky paranoia within the Biden camp more than three years ago, just imagine what it must be like today. It’s no wonder he can’t seem to even find his way without an escort. No wonder he continually embarrasses us on the world stage. No wonder his handlers now actively collude with the mainstream media to select his questions and his questioners in advance. No wonder that when he tries to wing it even for a few minutes, the results tend to be nothing short of disastrous.

What we have, then, is an administration that continually defrauds the American people into believing that their president can field legitimate questions from the media without first knowing precisely what those questions will be and who will ask them.

Imagine what our Founders would think if they knew that the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press had been disgracefully and summarily surrendered by the institution it was meant to protect. Instead of acting as a check against the usurpations of government, the media has become an enabler of those usurpations.

Steele looked back with sorrow on her brief interaction with the president. And she made a point, albeit indirectly, about the responsibility of First Lady Jill Biden — a point that we’ve made numerous times before:

I think it’s really heartbreaking that the people who love Joe Biden and say they truly care about him have allowed it to get to this point. So, I’m not even looking at this from a political angle or my beliefs in anything. This is the human side of it. And when someone is struggling, we allow them to continue to be in the spotlight and put them out there in the first place when they knew there were issues? Of course, they had to know.

It’s heartbreaking, alright, but not just for Joe Biden. After all, our country and its people have a stake in this as well.