Over the weekend the Trump campaign shared a clip of Joe Biden doing what Joe Biden often does: Making a gaffe.
While addressing supporters at a campaign rally in Kansas City, Mo., Biden got tongue-tied, accidentally asking the crowd to “re-elect him.”
"You want a nominee who will bring this party together, who will run a progressive, positive campaign, and turn, turn this primary from a campaign that’s about negative attacks into one about what we’re for,” Biden said. “Because we cannot get re-elect — um, we can not win this re-election. Excuse me. We can only re-elect Donald Trump."
As usually happens when Biden bungles his words, saying something he didn’t mean to say, a clip of this moment was posted online and quickly went viral. (A longer version of the clip is posted at the bottom of this article.)
After the Trump campaign’s Dan Scavino posted the clip, Twitter used a new feature to mark the video as “manipulated,” ostensibly because Scavino didn’t post Biden’s entire speech:
Facebook followed up, marking the objectively accurate recording as “partly false”:
To be clear: Biden is obviously not endorsing Trump’s re-election, but he did make an unfortunate gaffe in which he explicitly said exactly what the Trump campaign quoted him as saying. These social media companies presumably expect the Trump campaign to instead tweet: “While Biden said, ‘We can only re-elect Donald Trump,’ he actually meant to say something else.”
CNN’s “fact checker,” Daniel Dale, accused the Trump campaign of promoting “a video flagrantly dishonestly [sic] to wrongly make it seem Biden had accidentally endorsed Trump.”
This is extremely far-fetched in that the only people who might believe an ordinary Biden gaffe equated to a shock Trump endorsement are … idiots. And that’s exactly what Dale must think of CNN’s audience.
Back when the Bloomberg campaign released an obviously satirical video from a Democratic debate — in which Bloomberg asks if any of his fellow candidates have started a businesses, and there’s silence for 20 seconds and crickets are chirping — Dale thought it was important he inform his followers that in fact there were not crickets chipring during a prolonged silence during the debate:
The New York Times also apparently thinks so little of its readers’ intelligence that it wrote an article informing this clip was in fact a “manipulated video”:
By the Times’ standard, any news clip is now, by definition, “manipulated.”
The only “manipulation” happening here is precisely the opposite of what the Times is suggesting: The major media is falsely creating a popular impression that the Trump campaign is deceptively editing video of Biden to make him appear to make gaffes he’s not in fact making. Twitter, Facebook, CNN, and The New York Times are accusing the Trump campaign of manipulating the flow of information to affect the 2020 race when in fact they are the ones doing that.
Meanwhile, here’s the clip at the center of the controversy: