Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
A few weeks ago, Sara Lomax found herself live on air at the radio station she runs. Lomax is the president and CEO of WURD, Philadelphia’s only Black-owned talk radio station; she was addressing a controversy that had roiled her organization. Two days earlier, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, one of the station’s most beloved hosts, had confessed to interviewing Joe Biden using questions that had been provided to her by his campaign. “The questions were sent to me for approval,” Lawful-Sanders told CNN’s Victor Blackwell. He’d noticed that a number of her questions were nearly identical to those of Earl Ingram, a radio personality in Milwaukee, who had interviewed Biden the same week. “I approved them.”
At the time, the political press was consumed with the fallout from Biden’s catastrophic debate performance. But inside WURD, which has served Philadelphia’s Black community since 2002, the admission had sparked an uproar. Lomax quickly put out a statement: the interview “violates our practice of remaining an independent media outlet accountable to our listeners,” she wrote. Lawful-Sanders defended herself by saying that she didn’t identify as a journalist, that she believed she’d been following “industry-wide practices,” as she wrote in a statement, and that she never meant to deceive anyone. She voluntarily resigned.
On air, Lomax wanted to make sure listeners understood that Lawful-Sanders had not been fired: “She chose to resign and we accepted her resignation.” She reiterated that it was not WURD’s policy to use preselected questions for interviews. Then she mentioned something else: her frustration that the Biden team had put the station in this position in the first place by going directly to Lawful-Sanders. “The problem is they bypassed intentionally our established protocol,” she said.
It was a deeply painful moment for WURD—and many others in Black talk radio. A review by the New York Times revealed that half a dozen Black radio hosts had interviewed Biden over the course of 2024 using variants of the same questions: what were some of his accomplishments, what would he say to people who didn’t think their vote mattered, what’s at stake in the election for Black voters. (The campaign acknowledged distributing the questions, but insisted to reporters that it was “not at all an uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer.”) The picture didn’t look good, when viewed through the lens of journalistic ethics. Even so, members of the community couldn’t help but feel used. “The Biden White House is following its same old tricks again,” Marc Lamont Hill said that week on his podcast. “They once again are showing that they don’t respect Black media.”
Talk radio is an idiosyncratic format, and the credibility of hosts comes in part from their ability to authentically connect with listeners. Many contend, as Lawful-Sanders has, that they aren’t traditional reporters; adherence to journalism’s strictures could even undermine the work they do. Lawful-Sanders didn’t respond to an email, but some of the other hosts who interviewed Biden with prescreened questions said they felt no regret about how their conversations went, even after the controversy at WURD. Sherwin Hughes, of Milwaukee’s 101.7 The Truth, acknowledged that he’d had “a logistics call” with members of the Biden campaign team the day before an interview with the president in May, but denied being told what questions he had to use. (He began by asking Biden what was at stake for Black voters, but was proud to have posed a few questions of his own, including one about protecting the Affordable Care Act.)
Jessica Williams, the host of Afternoon Vibes on Charlotte’s Power 98, also said that she’d gotten “talking points” from the campaign. She began an interview in May with a prewritten question, but later asked Biden an original question about student loan forgiveness. Williams sees her job as providing “accurate information” to her listeners and creating a welcoming space for guests listeners want to hear from—including the president. “They’re not calling me to shoot the shit,” she said. “They’re calling me because they have a message they’re trying to get out, something they want to say. I want to honor what they want to say, but also I want to ask what my audience wants to know about.” (She was happy to report that after the interview, Biden followed through on a promise to call her parents.)
Still, the Biden campaign would seem to have taken advantage of Black talk radio’s hospitality—and exploited the power it held over these small stations. “The ways in which political campaigns engage with Black media matter, as they can either lift our community up or cause greater harm,” Lomax said in a statement to CJR. “In this most recent situation, the campaign’s intentional effort to bypass our processes clearly created greater harm.”
Cheryl Thompson-Morton, who runs the Black Media Initiative at the City University of New York, describes Black media as being, historically, “the second-most important institution in American Black life after the church”; today, she said, there are just four Black-owned talk radio stations in the country: WVON in Chicago, WNOV in Milwaukee, KJLH in Los Angeles, and WURD. According to the initiative’s research, Black news outlets are more likely than mainstream ones to cover stories that matter to Black communities, and to use humanizing language when discussing major world events: “son” in the context of police shootings; “care” with COVID. “These are terms that are in the top one hundred in Black media, but not in mainstream coverage,” Thompson-Morton said. But as community outlets, they feel “that politicians often don’t engage with them and don’t find them to be of value and don’t give them the same respect as their mainstream counterparts,” she added. “This is a story that comes up over and over again about how community media, and Black media, are often delegitimized. People feel like, I’ll get to you when I feel like it, and you should feel privileged when I do.”
David Brown—a former general manager at WURD who is now assistant dean for community and communications at Temple University, and still consults with the station—viewed the situation in similar terms. “If you’re a community publication, you’re almost, like, honored that they’re giving you this level of access,” he said. “You might even think, Who am I to push back?” He wished Lawful-Sanders, whom he said he deeply admires, had done that. Still, he said, “I see this as an example where Black media in particular is often just taken for granted.” He went on: “The fact is that at this level of our country you thought you could circumvent the process—that’s just disrespectful.”
Throughout it all, WURD was the station that most made a point of asserting its journalistic principles. That was no accident. “I am proud, if you can use that word, that we have such a level of journalistic integrity that we can—and do—push back when things like this go down,” Brown said. (Civic Media, which owns The Earl Ingram Show, admitted to removing two snippets from its interview, at the Biden team’s request, for which the company apologized but took no further action.) “The importance of independent media cannot be overstated, especially independent Black media,” Lomax said. “Mainstream media has historically ignored, marginalized, and stereotyped Black people in their coverage, and this practice of delegitimizing Black voices continues today.”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
