Fox’s Kurtz Fires Back at Biden White House For Complaints About Viral Videos: ‘May Be Cheap, But Not Necessarily Fake’

Alex GriffingJun 18th, 2024, 5:30 pm
 

Fox News host and media correspondent, Howie Kurtz, joined America Reports on Tuesday to weigh in on the White House pushing back against viral clips of President Joe Biden looking senile, dubbing them “cheapfakes.”

Anchor John Roberts asked Kurtz to react to the press secretary’s strong statement attacking the clips on Monday.

“An unusually aggressive Karine Jean-Pierre following an unusually aggressive strategy of trying to muddy the waters here,” Kurtz said, adding:

But let me say first that, despite a couple of misleading headlines, Fox News has not shown any distorted video of Joe Biden, though some of its commentators who paid for their opinions have talked about what they see as a fundamental decline.

Now, the New York Post, owned by Fox’s sister company, intentionally or not, appeared to follow the RNC lead in running a front page cropped photo that seems to show at the G7, Joe Biden staring off into space when just a few feet away, but you can’t see it in the picture are those skydivers who just landed here. But there’s a different kind of, conflation going on here that, anything that you see now is manipulated by the media is false, is fake, is bogus, and that’s flat out untrue.

Roberts then noted “it would be to their advantage to plant the seed in people’s minds” that clips of President Biden looking lost were somehow inaccurate representations. They went on to discuss the latest viral clip showing Biden being led off stage by Barack Obama.

“Yeah, I find what Barack Obama did inexplicable because he knows the narrative that is built up around his former vice president. And yet everything you saw there was real not one second was altered,” Kurtz said of the video, adding:

He took Biden by the hand and then led him off the stage with his hand consistently on his back. And I think that, I’m sure the Biden campaign is not happy about it. But the point is that happened. Nobody can spin it. We all saw it. Nothing was altered.

And it seems to me that, you know, we can debate whether a couple moments earlier you said, was Biden frozen in confusion, as some are saying, or was he just basking in the audience applause. But at the same time, to suggest that anything like that, is any unflattering video of Joe Biden that appears to show him being frail, he’s 81 years old, as we all know, has got to be fake, has got to be manipulated. It is a deepfake. It’s a cheapfake. It may be cheap, John, but it’s not necessarily fake.

Criticism of the clip had been dismissed by many who noted that Biden had deliberately stopped to soak up applause. “Biden is senile and decrepit but not sure Obama needed to lead him away. Biden had been applauding moments earlier and then stood there absorbing the applause for a bit when Obama reached out and grabbed his wrist. I bet WH staff is annoyed with Obama,” commented Fox’s Brit Hume on the topic.

Watch the clip above.

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Alex Griffing - Senior Editor

Alex Griffing is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Send tips via email: alexanderg@mediaite.com. Follow him on Twitter: @alexgriffing