OPINION:
In 2020, the mainstream media protected then-candidate Joe Biden by dismissing his son’s laptop as “Russian disinformation” when it wasn’t. This time, they’re howling over unflattering video clips of President Biden and declaring them fake when they aren’t.
The videos encapsulate voter concerns that Mr. Biden is not physically or mentally fit to be president, so the White House has activated their rapid response system and called on their media pals for help.
In one clip from the recent G7 summit, Mr. Biden watched the end of a skydiving exhibition when he wandered away from his foreign counterparts. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni physically pulled him back.
After the video went viral, the White House furiously claimed that wider shots showed Mr. Biden shuffling over to speak to a skydiver. That’s fair, but it’s also true that something compelled Ms. Meloni to retrieve the free world’s leader as if he were a lost toddler.
Another video came from the end of a glitzy fundraiser featuring Mr. Biden with late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel and former President Barack Obama. As they prepared to leave the stage, Mr. Biden stood still for several seconds before Mr. Obama grabbed him by the forearm to turn him toward the exit. Mr. Obama then placed his hand on Mr. Biden’s back and guided him offstage, with the hand remaining in place for a long while until the group disappeared from view.
Sure, it was believable that Mr. Biden had stopped on stage to bask in the applause as the White House offered. But again, it’s undeniable that a person standing near Mr. Biden — once again — felt the need to assist in moving the president from one place to another.
This is where the White House overreached and introduced a term that most Americans had probably never heard before — “cheap fakes.”
Not to be confused with deepfakes, which are usually products of artificial intelligence, cheap fakes are described as videos manipulated by simpler means, such as regular cropping or editing. By raising this as an objection, the White House declared that the videos being circulated online and by conservative media were phony.
Now, you can argue over the proper context for videos that can be interpreted differently. And it would be normal for Mr. Biden’s campaign to claim that political opponents are mischaracterizing the clips.
But you can’t say these videos are fake, because they’re not. They clearly depict important global figures showing obvious concern for Mr. Biden and getting involved in handling him at public events.
The fear inside the White House is that these real moments will keep happening, so they’ve summoned their media acolytes to try to cast doubt on all videos as an inoculation against Biden glitches and brain freezes that are sure to come.
The Associated Press tried to wish away the Obama incident in a “Fact Focus” piece, writing that the former president was just being “chummy,” according to “a source who helped organize, and attended, the fundraiser.” Meanwhile, a spokesman for Mr. Kimmel said the uproar was “nonsense.”
The evidence cited in a fact-check included an unnamed Biden donor and the press agent for a former co-host of “The Man Show” on Comedy Central.
The Washington Post piled on, saying the videos “deeply mislead” with “deceptive framing.”
CBS was just embarrassed, as it had to delete and repost its story about cheap fakes after they included the wrong version of one of the videos. That meant that their own story was — say it with me — a cheap fake.
But NBC won the award for the funniest spin for explaining that as a person, Mr. Obama is simply “more punctual” than Mr. Biden and merely “signaled it was time to leave the stage.”
Yes, they claimed that Mr. Obama was just worried it was late.
But here’s the problem: Mr. Biden’s whole reelection plan depends on people disbelieving their own experiences.
Voters know that inflation is bad, even when Mr. Biden says it’s not.
They know the border is wide open, even though Mr. Biden says it’s closed.
And they know that Mr. Biden often looks lost, so claiming that these are just dirty political tricks doesn’t fool anyone.
The irony is that Attorney General Merrick Garland has just been held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audiotapes of Mr. Biden’s interview with prosecutors in the classified documents case. So it’s not cheap fakes they’re afraid of — it’s Mr. Biden’s true condition they’re trying to obscure.
What the media are doing is setting fire to what little credibility they have left by once again trying to convince normal Americans that they’re not actually seeing what they’re seeing. And that’s a hard sell.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist, a communications consultant, the co-host of the “Line Drive Podcast” and the author of the Amazon bestselling book “Swing Hard in Case You Hit It: My Escape From Addiction and Shot at Redemption on the Trump Campaign.”
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