"If you could design the perfect interviewee for Ziwe Fumudoh in a lab, you might be tempted to create someone a lot like Eric Adams. The disgraced outgoing mayor of New York City is a big personality in a position of power with numerous scandals and gaffes for Fumudoh to prod at in her signature affably combative style. Last week, the world got to see what this looked like in practice when Fumudoh posted an interview with Adams on her YouTube channel."
"Before Fumudoh was interviewing high-profile politicians, she was best known for hosting Baited, an interview series that exploded in popularity when she started streaming episodes on Instagram Live in 2020 during the early pandemic. (It previously was a YouTube series Fumudoh launched in 2017.) The title, she's said in interviews, was a tongue-in-cheek reference to real-life conversations she'd had about race with white peers, during which they'd accuse her of deliberately "baiting" them in response to basic questions she asked in good faith."
Ziwe Fumudoh rose to prominence hosting Baited, an interview series she launched on YouTube in 2017 and popularized on Instagram Live during the 2020 pandemic. The show's title referenced real conversations about race in which white peers accused her of "baiting" them. Guests such as Caroline Calloway, Alison Roman, and Alyssa Milano often faltered when asked pointed questions like "How many Black friends do you have?" Early comparisons tied her awkward approach to Between Two Ferns and Jiminy Glick, but her aim targeted empty liberalism rather than celebrity artifice. A recent interview with Eric Adams produced few memorable moments and raised questions about the approach's current effectiveness.
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