The anti-Biden activists at the Media Research Center unsurprisingly pounced on a video of President Biden at the G-7 summit in Japan that made it look he was aimlessly wandering off — and was in denial that the video was deceptive. Tim Graham grumbled on his June 14 podcast:
Anti-Biden social-media accounts shared video of Joe Biden turning around and seemingly wandering off at the G-7 summit, and the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni worked to turn him around like Jill Biden does. The pro-Biden media were furious that the “Murdoch Media” was spreading this clip mocking the “Meander In Chief.” (That was the New York Post headline.)
The “mainstream” crew pro-Biden media acts like a journalistic Secret Service, protecting the reputation of Democrats from a negative narrative.
MSNBC’s Morning Joe struck its usual Downward Facing Dog yoga pose, attacking “cheap fakes” and “vicious lies,” as if the video was fake news: “Even critics were saying that he did a strong job, very good job representing the United States,” they claimed. This is the same program where Scarborough said “F-you if you can’t handle the truth. This version of Biden — intellectually, analytically — is the best Biden ever!”
The Stelteresque reporters at the Daily Beast had the headline “White House Rips Desperate Murdoch Press Over Deceptive Biden Video.” They were just promoting the tweets of press aide Andrew Bates and going after this idea that Murdoch media – like the Wall Street Journal article on Biden Slipping – are pushing fake news that Biden’s a geezer doing too much geez-ing[.]
What Graham doesn’t do, however, is admit those critics were right — as a real news organization pointed out, Biden did wander … but to give a thumbs-up to a group of paratroopers preparing their parachutes, meaning that video was in fact deceptively edited. But the MRC had its narrative and it needed to defend it, no matter how false it is.
When MSNBC host Joe Scarborough called such deceptive videos “cheap fakes,” Mark Finkelstein whined in a June 17 post: “The funny part came came when Joe Scarborough attacked Trump’s “right-wing stooges” for suggesting Biden’s mentally failing. As if Scarborough isn’t a stooge for Biden, angrily arguing Biden’s the sharpest he’s ever been?” Finkelstein didn’t admit the deceptive nature of the video.
P.J. Gladnick defended the deceptive video in a June 18 post:
The Democrats and their media allies now have a new shtick. If they find a video to be embarrassing, especially videos revealing Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, they now pretend they are really “deepfakes” and “cheap fakes.”
On the CNBC afternoon show The Exchange on Monday, anchor Kelly Evans previewed a segment with current CNBC contributor and former Democrat Senator Heidi Heitkamp: “The rise of AI-generated deepfakes is on the rise ahead of this November’s election. Is it too late for Congress to regulate the industry?”
Evans put on screen the video revealing Joe Biden turning around and wandering a few steps away during a skydiving exhibition at the G-7 meeting in Italy. Watch the two versions of the video in which the CNBC host and contributor desperately want you to believe the first is a mere AI fake despite the fact that the second video shot at a different angle also shows Biden wandering away from the rest of the group.
[…]So what they call the “real video” showed exactly the same scene but at a different angle from what Evans and Heitkamp are suggesting was an AI fake video in the first clip presented. It’s not just that Biden turns around, but that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni moved quite quickly in both videos to retrieve the wandering Biden.
It’s hard to believe that Evans and Heitkamp think the viewers could be fooled by their explanation but their extreme gaslighting does reveal the level of their desperation to salvage Biden.
Gladnick censored the fact that Biden interacted with paratroopers. Looks like he’s the one who’s gaslighting.
Joege Bonilla whined in a June 19 post that the non-right-wing media, by reporting what actually happened, was “adopt[ing] The White House’s “cheap fakes” talking point as they try to wish this story away.” He then tried to spin the accurate video as still showing something bad:
We must begin by fact-checking the fact-check, which tries to negate claims that Biden wandered off by explaining that he was simply talking to the parachutists that had performed their exhibition at the G7. Biden wandered away from a group photo, and the Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is clearly seen making her way through the crowd and wrangling Biden back into the photo. This set of facts is not in dispute.
Curtis Houck ran to Fox News (where of course, no guest with a diverging opinion was allowed) to rant about the situation, though he didn’t discuss the G-7 video specifically, let alone admit that the preferred right-wing clip of it was deceptive:
Late Tuesday on the Fox News Channel’s Fox News @ Night, NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck joined fill-in host Kevin Corke and fellow panelist Amber Duke of The Spectator to lay waste to the full-court press by the Biden administration to label raw, unedited videos illustrating President Biden’s cognitive decline as deep fakes, “cheap fakes”, and part of a far-right disinformation campaign.
Catherine Salgado attached the MRC’s dishonest “censorship” narrative to discussion of the video in a June 18 post:
A Biden campaign spokeswoman went on MSNBC to whine that more censorship is necessary to protect Democrat Joe Biden ahead of the 2024 election.
When Biden was caught on video disorientedly ambling away from other G7 leaders in Italy, only to be stopped and redirected by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the video quickly went viral online. Biden supporters are now claiming the video was taken out of context. Biden campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod went on MSNBC to suggest the video’s virality shows a need for more suppression of speech online.
“Disinformation is alive and well,” Elrod intoned. She tried to play up Biden as a patriotic leader without addressing the president’s clear confusion and habitual wandering. “Biden was out there literally representing America at the G7, saluting our troops, you know, doing what he does as president of the United States.”
She then made a rambling demand for increased suppression of free speech: “Look, we’re gonna see more of this. I mean, this is just the reality of campaigning in 2024. So we have to combat that disinformation. We have to hit it hard when it happens and make it clear that these are dirty tactics that MAGA Republicans are using because they can’t run on the issues.”
Without explaining how it’s “disinformation” to show authentic clips of Biden messing up, Elrod called on Big Tech, “surrogates” and the media to endorse her calls for increased censorship.
If that video was deceptive, it cannot possibly be “authentic” if other authentic clips discredit it. Salgado wouldn’t admit that the right-wing-preferred video omitted the paratroopers Biden was interacting with.
Graham returned to whine further in his June 19 column:
Start with a video from a skydiving demonstration at the G-7 summit in Italy. Biden appeared to be wandering away from European leaders to look at something behind him. It turns out he was giving two thumbs-up to a skydiver behind him. But what everyone saw was the leaders of Italy and France trying to discreetly rush and turn Biden around for photographs. It looked like they had “orders” to keep Grandpa on track.
PolitiFact claimed it was “False” to say Biden “wandered off” (the cheeky New York Post headline was “Meander In Chief”). Washington Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler’s article carried the hot headline “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead.” Kessler could have awarded Two Pinocchios (“Significant omissions and/or exaggerations”) but careened into ruling Four Pinocchios, for “Whoppers.” This isn’t fact-checking. It’s spin-spoiling.
“Morning Joe” spent several days raging against the G-7 video, with Mika Brzezinski quoting a distraught Democrat strategist: “The lie sprinting the 100-meter dash and the fact check is taking a stroll on the beach.” Watching European leaders try to “rescue” Biden from meandering is now a “lie.”
Again, Graham refused to admit that the right-wing-preferred clip omitted the paratroopers Biden interacted with — the factual basis of the “cheapfake” criticism — meaning that the critics were right.
Bill D’Agostino did his own reframing in another June 19 post:
One of the videos in question shows Biden seemingly wandering off during the G7 summit while walking with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. The video appears to have been shot vertically on a smartphone, which makes it hard to tell that he was actually walking over to talk to a paratrooper just off-screen. At least, that’s what the White House claims.
But to claim that this supposed lack of context renders the entire video “fake” is insanely dishonest. It’s not like it was doctored or AI-generated. The vertical framing of the video may exclude some context, but it doesn’t change the fact that the President got distracted and wandered over to talk to somebody while he was supposed to be speaking with Meloni.
Given that the preferred right-wing-promoted cut didn’t include the paratroopers, it discredits those right-wingers to push a discredited narrative based on it — and it gives people credible license to criticize the Biden-is-senile narrative and reason to criticize other videos. But D’Agostino and his fellow MRCers were too committed to the narrative to admit it was discredited and were desperate to reframe the full, unedited video as supporting that narrative. Mary Clare Waldron did something similar in a June 20 post:
Again, many of these videos deemed “fake” by CNN simply highlight a major issue among voters, and more than age, the problem is capability. Yes, both Trump and Biden are older, that is not the issue, as both are not equally capable.
Bonilla repeated his narrative again in a June 21 post: “Biden did meander at the G7. Biden walked away from a staged photo-op in order to talk to the skydivers. Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni wrangled Biden back into the picture, moving some prime ministers around in the process.” But Bonilla ignored that the right-wing-preferred video deceptively portrayed Biden as wandering off to nowhere, and he will never admit that dishonesty.