‘Highly Misleading and Selectively Edited’: Calls Against ‘Cheap Fakes’ Grow Louder
White House, media battle dishonest right-wing attacks
Efforts to debunk and pushback against a proliferation of “highly misleading and selectively edited” videos being released by the Republican party and other opponents of President Biden are growing.
A growing number of journalists in the news media — as well as Biden’s own chief spokesperson — are fighting back against this insidious form of disinformation, known as “cheap fakes.”
These are videos — such as a recent number of clips that came out of Biden’s recent participation in the 80th anniversary of D-Day in France — which dishonestly attempt to portray the president as disoriented and confused.
Although the Washington Post published a piece which debunked those false D-Day clips, this type of video continues to spread.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre focused outrage against these “cheap fakes” Monday during her regular press briefing.
“They are cheap fakes video. They are done in bad faith. And — and some of your news organization have been very clear, have stressed that the right-wing critics of the president have a credibility problem because the fact-checkers have repeatedly caught them pushing misinformation, disinformation,” Jean-Pierre said. “And so we see this, and this is something coming from your part of the world, calling them cheap fakes and misinformation. And I’ll quote the Washington Post where they wrote about this and they said how Republican use misleading videos to attack Biden in a 24-hour period.
“And to their credit, we have the conservative Washington Examiner did call them out as well, calling out the New York Post,” she added. “Ironically, several recent cheap fakes actually attacked the president for thanking troops, for thanking troops — that is what they are attacking the president for — both in Normandy this happen, and again in Italy.
“And I think that it tells you everything that we need to know about how desperate — how desperate — Republicans are here,” Jean-Pierre said. “And instead of talking about the president’s performance in office — and what I mean by that is his legislative wins, what he’s been able to do for the American people across the country — we’re seeing these deep fakes, these manipulated videos, and it is, again, done in bad faith.”
A number of members of the media not only picked up on Jean-Pierre’s remarks, but went further by noting that while some dishonestly spread these “cheap fakes” against Biden, they ignore the the very-evident mental deterioration of his presumptive opponent this year, Donald Trump.
“There’s a growing and insidious trend in right-wing media, broadcast, print and social media. It is to take highly misleading and selectively edited videos of President Biden directly from Republican National Committee social media accounts, and then use those videos to spread messages virally to cast doubt on President Biden’s fitness for office,” MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said, on-air Monday. “Here is this headline from the New York Post: ‘Biden appears to freeze up, has to be led off stage by Obama at mega-bucks L.A. fundraiser.’ The full video posted by Biden finance chair on Twitter shows something entirely different, Biden reacting to applause and then walking off stage with former President Obama.
“It comes less than one week after the New York Post made a cover out of another piece of deceptively edited tape calling him ‘Meander in Chief’ due to what they claim was Biden walking away during a skydiving demonstration during the G7 summit last week,” Wallace added. “The only problem is that the full video — which emerged almost instantly — shows Biden was going over to congratulate one of the skydivers who’s cropped out of the video entirely.
“But the articles are based on cheap fakes, videos of real events that are intentionally manipulated to fool viewers, released on an RNC opposition research social media account with zero independent fact-checking by these so-called journalists and spread throughout the right-wing ecosystem,” she said. “We would take the hand-wringing by right-wing media about Biden’s mental fitness and videos intentionally manipulated to make him look unfit maybe a little more seriously if they weren’t radio silent about the repeated glaring and real mental lapses happening behind podiums and on-camera on the part of Donald Trump.”
Former Republican chairman Michael Steele not only condemned the use of cheap fakes, he noted their connection with artificial intelligence technology.
“The AI-generated ads where you can take these events — you talk about taking a clip and just showing one angle from it. We’ve already seen the RNC and the Trump campaign effort play in this space when the RNC put out its AI ad last fall, didn’t tell anybody, they had completely made it up out of whole cloth,” said Steele, a one-time lieutenant governor of Maryland. “And then, of course, the robo calls, using the voice of the president to tell voters not to vote during the New Hampshire primary. So you’ve already seen these practices put in place. The problem is, it’s not just one of, oh, guess what, fact checkers can’t catch up or keep up. The problem is you have mainstream media outlets that are — as you mentioned before, The Wall Street Journal — in their own ways perpetuating, so it gives an air of legitimacy to some of this.
“And before you have a chance to come back and say, ‘Wait a minute, Wall Street Journal, what the hell are you doing? You know that’s not what this is. Why don’t you come clean about it?’ It’s already been placed up on X, right, a platform than Elon Musk said, ‘Hey, lie as much as you want, we don’t care,’ and it goes out there and then what do you do?” Steele asked. “So you’re right, I think the main people kind of know some of this, but it’s going to get worse, not better, between now and November, and that’s gonna be the difficult part, particularly for American media that wants to try to play the balls and strikes, but wind up actually, you know, tipping their hand a little bit from time to time.”
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