Team Biden has its collective undies in a bunch over what they call fake news – or to use the new term, “cheap fake.” They are currently focusing on videos that portray President Biden as feeble and in the early stages of age-related non compos mentis.
They are calling the videos “fake” – implying that they are carefully recorded and edited to give a false impression of Biden’s vitality and mental acuity. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierrie has called the videos both “deep fake” and “cheap fake.” She is fibbing (fake news?) in both cases. The term “deep fake” has come to describe images and recordings that are created by Artificial Intelligence. That is NOT what the videos of Biden are.
Some, like Jean-Pierrie, use the term “cheap fake” to describe videos, recordings and quotes that are allegedly altered or taken out of context to give a false impression. The videos are not that either. They are not the result of sinister manipulation. In fact, many of them are the product of media pool cameras that supply copies to all the news outlets. What you see is what you get.
This is just another example of Democrats wanting you to believe their campaign propaganda narratives over what we the people can see with our own eyes.
How many times have we been told that the American border is secure – is not open? Yet thanks to an array of news services, we have seen examples of the more than eight million illegals who have crossed the border since Biden took office and reversed more than 80 of Trump’s border protection orders. Calling the border secure is fake news.
How many times have American families been told that they are living in one of the best economies in American history – even as they are being crushed by inflation, soaring interest rates, poor wage growth and housing and mortgage costs that are putting home ownership out of reach of most younger Americans. The good times political gospel is of fake news.
At this time four years ago, we were in a conspiracy between the White House, the intelligence community emeritus, the media and the boys running big tech. They peddled a fake story that they knew was not true because they made it up. You know — how the Hunter Biden laptop, and its damning contents, were all the work of Russian mischief.
Speaking of the Russians, we have an example of “deep fake” in terms of the bogus Steele Dossier. That was the so-called intelligence document that was invented and paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. They deep faked a document to create fake news.
Unfortunately, fake stories that become fake news are ubiquitous in politics. Former Congressman George Santos created fake news stories about himself with a resume that would be filed under “fiction” in the local library. Ditto with President Biden. Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal bragged about his combat experience in Vietnam for years until it was revealed that he had none. Hillary Clinton told of her harrowing experience when she came under sniper fire arriving in Bosnia. She apparently mistook the little girl peacefully handing her flowers for a terrorist.
It is one thing to spin the facts through partisan interpretation. But quite another to use the news media to create and use phony narratives and phony “evidence” to create fake stories. What can be said is that those videos of Biden looking feeble and confused at times are not fake news. It is reality captured on camera. Those who push back at those videos, like Jean-Pierrie, are the ones engaged in the production of fake news.
Ironically, the wave of pushback generated by Team Biden may be backfiring. It has brought a lot more attention to the videos. To use the media expression, it has given the story ‘legs.” The videos are being seen by more people more often than they would have.
Singer Barbara Streisand is a good example. She took to X to criticize the videos, saying that media outlets should not “amplify” the videos that she called “disinformation.” She was flooded with responses from folks who had not seen the videos but then checked them out.
Despite the pushback spin, the videos appear to show Biden in serious senior moments – both visually and verbally. The claims that the videos are somehow faked or disinformation are not credible when you see them.
So, there ‘tis.
FOOTNOTE: Interestingly, the political cartoon atop this commentary was the work of Frederick Burr Opper and published in 1894 as a condemnation of the news media. Some things never change.