A member of the White House communications team went after The New York Post on Thursday after it posted on social media a deceptively edited video of President Joe Biden at the G7 economic summit in Italy.
White House Senior Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates responded to a post by the publication on X that had the caption, “President Biden appeared to wander off at the G7 summit in Italy, with officials needing to pull him back to focus.”
“The Murdoch outlets are so desperate to distract from @POTUS’s record that they just lie,” Bates wrote.
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The Post is owned by News Corp, which has Australian billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch—the creator of Fox News—as its chairman emeritus.
“Here, they use an artificially narrow frame to hide from viewers that he just saw a skydiving demonstration,” Bates continued. “He’s saying congratulations to one of the divers and giving a thumbs up.”
Bates included a wider version of the same clip which shows Biden walking over toward one of the skydivers, who could not be seen in the Post’s video.
The Post isn’t the only Murdoch-owned paper that the White House’s press team has criticized lately. In taking issue with a report in The Wall Street Journal claiming that Biden’s mental acuity was “slipping,” Bates called attention to how some Democrats in Congress said their quotes to the contrary were cut from the article.
Bates also linked to a Media Matters for America article making the case that the Journal’s story was “comically weak” in part because it was “based largely on the complaints of anonymous Republicans,” and also on former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, “a notoriously dishonest person…who lost his speakership because he was widely distrusted.”
