Did fact-checkers overlook signs of Biden’s decline?
In June, the Republican National Committee posted a video that seemed to show Joe Biden wandering off from a group of world leaders at the Group of Seven summit. The video, which was widely distributed by conservative outlets (the New York Post: “Meander in Chief”), was edited to crop out who Biden was interacting with: a group of paratroopers, just done with a skydiving demonstration. It was one of several deceptively altered clips that circulated in conservative spaces that month—and were swiftly debunked by mainstream outlets. “‘Cheapfake’ Biden videos enrapture right-wing media, but deeply mislead,” the Washington Post wrote in a takedown. “Conservative media uses misleading camera angle of Biden to falsely claim that he was wandering aimlessly,” is how NBC News put it. Evaluating a slew of videos, including one from a D-Day commemoration where Biden appeared to have difficulty sitting down, the New York Times declared that they were posing “a major challenge for the president as he tries to persuade voters he has the energy for a second term.” In the aftermath of the presidential debate, we now know that Biden was in fact struggling during this period, both physically and mentally. The debunkings that circulated in the weeks leading up to the debate got the facts in front of them right. But did they miss the bigger story?
I reached out to several of the outlets that covered the viral Biden videos, including the Washington Post, NBC News, Politifact, and the Times. Most of them declined to reassess their work, but Glenn Kessler, who took on the G7 video for the Post, felt he’d done his job. “Fact-checking is not supposed to say, This is a manipulated video, but there’s a quote-unquote larger truth here that Biden might be an old man,” he told me. “If you look at the Washington Post’s coverage, you can see the pieces done by the White House correspondents, by the opinion writers, that talk about the question of whether or not Joe Biden is showing signs of age. Fact-checks do not supplement the political reporting of the Washington Post, they complement it.” Kessler’s view—that there’s a legitimate role for coverage narrowly focused on the confirmable facts at hand (whether far-fetched claims are justified by an edited video, say)—is widely held. But as Lucas Graves, a professor at the University of Wisconsin’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a leading researcher on political fact-checking, told me, this is in part because fact-checking is a poor instrument for trying to divine larger truths. “Fact-checking works best when fact-checkers are able to focus on discrete, very specific claims and assess their veracity,” he said. “They are often criticized for not getting the whole picture because when they find evidence of deception they really highlight that, and of course something can be deceptive but there can still be some truth to it.” He calls this the industry’s “Achilles’ heel.”
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