Keith Olbermann's Criticisms Of Sage Steele Continue To Ring Hollow

In a one-on-one sitdown conversation, Sage Steele interviewed Joe Biden in 2021 for ESPN. Steele said earlier this week that executives at the company "scripted" the entire interview.

"It was very much ‘This is what you will ask. This is how you will say it. No follow-ups, no follow-ups. Next,'" Steele told Fox News Digital. She added that she had to go over each question "dozens of times by many editors and executives."

Former ESPN host Keith Olbermann tried to take amusement in the revelation. Thursday, he posted on X that ESPN had to script the interview because Steele is not "too dumb" to conduct it on her own.

"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," said Olbermann.

"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?" he added in a follow-up post to his original post.

Olbermann has since turned off replies to the post. You can't comment on it. We don't blame him. His assertion doesn't make any sense. 

ESPN could have deployed anyone at the network to interview Biden. If ESPN was trying to protect itself from humiliation at the hands of Steele, as Olbermann asserts, the network would have simply chosen another host to conduct the interview. 

The truth: ESPN handed Steele the interview because, politics aside, she was one of the more skilled broadcasters at the network. 

As hip as Elle Duncan and Chiney Ogwumike are to Black Twitter, ESPN could not in good faith trust them to interview someone of actual significance. 

Even if that someone of significance is in obvious cognitive decline.

Speaking of "dumb," has Olbermann ever addressed his peculiar tweet in which he claimed to shed tears of urine?

Or what's included in his Rolodex prescription meds?

Anyway, OutKick asked ESPN if it could confirm or deny Sage Steele's comments about scripting her interview. We also sought to find out if ESPN handed Biden's team the list of questions prior to the conversation, a cardinal sin of Western journalism. 

Unfortunately, ESPN did not respond. We will be sure to update this article if it does.

Secondly, Steele's remarks about ESPN debunk another popular criticism Olbermann and her critics have levied against her: that she sued ESPN and parent company Disney as part of a "money grab."

Steele has answered questions honestly about ESPN since the week she settled her lawsuit last August, including several answers less than pleasing to the ears of her former employer. 

She's able to answer questions about ESPN candidly because she did not sign a non-disclosure agreement as part of her settlement. She would not be able to discuss said topics if she had. 

Steele would have received a large settlement by signing an NDA. She chose not to, on the basis that her lawsuit was rooted in what she felt was a violation of her free speech rights via her employer.

Photo via Gunther Eagleman™

See, Sage Steele could have shut up and succumbed to the whims of Disney's imbalanced ideological policies. As a woman of color, she could have continued to cash in her paychecks for $3 million a year. 

Instead, she jeopardized her financial security and cushy lifestyle to prove a point: that political double standards in corporate America are real and they are wrong. 

Steele cost herself money by suing Disney, leaving ESPN, and not signing an NDA. Her lawsuit was never about the money, as we explained in a column last summer.

Ultimately, Sage is one of the rare figures with the inside knowledge, reach, and freedom to expose the instilled sins of Big Media. Thus, why her contemporaries – including  slobs like Olbermann, Ryan Clark, Nicole Briscoe  – are so threaded by her