Fri, June 14, 2024
The White House is slamming the New York Post for pushing out a video on social media, and later a cover story, claiming that President Joe Biden wandered off as he and other world leaders watched a skydiving demonstration at the G7 summit in Italy.
The Post video came with the message, “President Biden appeared to wander off at the G7 summit in Italy, with officials needing to pull him back to focus.”
But White House spokesman Andrew Bates noted that the video that the Post shared was cropped, missing the context of what Biden was doing: Speaking and congratulating another skydiver as some of the other world leaders were observing a separate diver.
Bates shared the video with the wider angle and wrote, “The Murdoch outlets are so desperate to distract from @POTUS‘s record that they just lie. Here, they use an artificially narrow frame to hide from viewers that he just saw a skydiving demonstration. He’s saying congratulations to one of the divers and giving a thumbs up.” Bates also included the Post’s video edit.
The video was shared across media on the right, including for a digital story written for Sinclair Broadcast Group’s The National Desk for posting on local station websites. That story picked up on the Post’s cropped video. The story also referred to claims of an incident last week of Biden at D-Day celebrations. The video showed Biden pausing before sitting, in what right wing figures claimed was the president’s confusion over a non-existent chair. In fact, a longer version of the video shows the president’s pause was as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was about to be introduced. The video then showed Biden taking his seat in that very spot.
The New York Post also featured the G7 incident for the cover of its print edition, with the headline, “Meander in Chief.”
Bates later wrote on X, “Rupert Murdoch remains jealous of a younger man running a more complex operation.”
A spokesperson for the Post, owned by News Corp., did not return a request for comment, nor did a spokesperson for News Corp.
“Beware cheap fakes … and all the bad faith actors who post them,” wrote White House Communications Director Ben LaBolt.
Last week, Sinclair stations picked up a story in The Wall Street Journal that reported that Biden was “slipping,” with accounts of the president during certain meetings with lawmakers. But the White House and other critics noted that the story included only one critical on-the-record source, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
The site Popular Information compiled videos of Sinclair anchors in different markets reading identical copy about the Journal story. Morning Joe, among other outlets, featured the compilation.
Sinclair called the criticisms “outrageous and offensive” and claimed that it had “covered this story from both sides of the political aisle.” The script included some of the pushback from Democrats over the Journal story. The station group also defended the use of the same script across stations, calling it a “common practice in the industry” and noting that affiliates “often use a preproduced script for a package that has been provided by a different media source.
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