ABC News changed its transcript of President Joe Biden’s remarks during his high-stakes interview with anchor George Stephanopoulos that aired on Friday.
The interview, which was Biden’s first since his disastrous showing at CNN’s presidential debate the previous week, was a chance for the geriatric incumbent to beat back critics demanding that he step down and turn the Democrat nomination over to VP Kamala Harris.
But it wasn’t the success that the White House was hoping for with the 81-year-old coming across like a delusional egomaniac who said that only God could get him to drop out of the 2024 race and Biden was mocked for saying he’d do the “goodest job” he could to prevent Donald J. Trump from returning to power.
Biden: “If Trump wins in November, I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and did the goodest job I know I could do.”
“The goodest job”
pic.twitter.com/zQuGYUdI0F— Greg Price (@greg_price11) July 6, 2024
Even though it was on video for all to see and hear, the White House was furious and bullied the network into changing its official transcription to replace “goodest job” with a more coherent version of Biden’s remarks, explaining that it had been “updated for clarity.”
According to the initial version of the transcript that was released on Friday, Biden said, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
By Saturday, it had been revised to read, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
“Following Friday’s interview, White House stenographers, who are not political appointees and regularly record all of the president’s public remarks, noticed a difference between their recordings and the ABC transcript, according to one person familiar with the situation,” the New York Times reported. “That led a White House official to raise the issue of the quote’s accuracy with representatives of ABC on Saturday morning, the person said.”
In addition to ABC, the White House also pressured New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to change “goodest” which she had used in a column on the interview.
TJ Ducklo is back, and he’s better than ever.
Another @maureendowd must-read, on Biden’s “goodest bunker ever”:https://t.co/gQuKzJz9LV pic.twitter.com/IXb7Yhk2gj
— Steve Krakauer (@SteveKrak) July 7, 2024
“After my column posted Saturday morning, T.J. Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman, emailed me to ‘flag’ that ABC News had updated its transcript to read: ‘I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about,'” Dowd wrote.
“Ducklo asked if I could “tweak” the column and change the word ‘goodest’ to make my piece ‘consistent with the corrected transcript,’ even though the revised version was also gobbledygook,” she added, writing that she told the White House apparatchik that she’d run it by the editor.
“Yeah again, it’s not what I think. It’s what ABC News, who conducted the interview, thinks. I think it would be quite unusual if the Times asserted the president said something that the news organization who conducted the interview says he didn’t say …” Ducklo wrote back.
In another email from the columnist and her editor, Dowd asked if ABC News changed it on their own or was it after they were bullied by the White House.
“ABC News, like any news organization, makes their own independent editorial decisions,” Ducklo replied, according to Dowd. “Surely you are not suggesting otherwise.”
The Times attached notes to her column and every other story that used “goodest,” the columnist said
“It might seem like much ado about goodest. But it’s a harbinger of tense times between a White House in bunker mode and a press corps in ferret mode,” Dowd wrote. “Maybe the White House should think about closed captioning.”
It was just the latest example of how the most cynical and dishonest White House in history has been able to work the refs in the media to gaslight the nation into believing that Biden hasn’t been a mentally-depleted version of his former self, a big lie as Americans saw for themselves during the CNN debate.
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