"Fact-Checks" Are the Real "Cheap Fakes"

Monday, the White House claimed real videos of Biden appearing lost were fake. WH Press Secretary cited “fact-checks” and used the term “cheap fakes” seven times to dismiss the videos. Of course, “fact-checks” deceiving the public to protect Biden is nothing new. Here’s one of the earliest examples I documented during Biden’s 2020 Presidential campaign.

In 2020, FactCheck.org labeled a Joe Biden video by Maggie VandenBerghe (Fog City Midge) “Partly False” because it was “Deceptively Edited to Make Him Appear ‘Lost’”. However, the video was not deceptively edited and nothing presented in the video is false. Nevertheless, the video remains falsely labeled “false”, and therefore suppressed, on Facebook to this day.

Joe Biden appears lost in the video because he is literally lost. Biden began his speech by greeting the wrong community center. (He is speaking at the William Hicks Anderson Center, not Kingswood). Biden tried to dismiss the screw-up as a joke: “Actually, that’s the one down I used to work. That’s a joke.” Then Biden confirmed he was lost: “Didn’t know where we were. Anyway…”.

What makes the embarrassing moment more concerning is that the community center is named after Biden’s old friend, William Hicks Anderson. Throughout the talk, Biden repeatedly referred to Hicks as “a good friend”. “He was a good friend…my buddy…Hicks and I went way way back…my buddy Hicks.”

Fact-Checking the Fact-Checker

In the FactCheck article’s sixth paragraph, fact-checker Saranac Hale Spencer finally identifies a specific edit for which she labeled the video “false”. She falsley accuses the video of editing out the end of a sentence. (Emphasis mine)

The video clip then shows Biden saying: “It’s great to be here and back in a place where… .” But the clip doesn’t include the rest of the sentence…

However, Biden never completed the sentence himself. Instead, Biden abruptly started an entirely new scrambled sentence: “I want to thank Willi—Wayne Jefferson for, uh, having us here”.

Spencer also criticized the video for not including a written notification that it was edited. But all the edits are visible for everyone to view in plain sight. There are no fancy graphics or advanced editing techniques to hide cuts from the audience. Only the most basic type of edits known as “jump cuts”. How can editing the passage of time be “deceptive” when the audience is made aware of each cut with such blatantly obvious visual cues?

Jump Cuts

The only false thing in the video was Biden’s claim that he was viewed on television by “over 340 million people” during his long media hiatus (“hiding in the basement”). Spencer acknowledged this claim was entirely unsupported.

We asked Biden’s campaign what that figure was based on, but we didn’t get a response. Videos on the campaign’s YouTube channel routinely get thousands or tens of thousands of views, and the campaign also posts videos on other social media platforms. But it’s unclear how Biden got the tally of 340 million.

Despite the lack of evidence, neither Spencer nor anyone else at FactCheck issued a “Partly False Information” label or fact-check article debunking Biden’s unsubstantiated claim.

According to NPR, Spencer was one of FactCheck’s first hires after beginning its partnership with Facebook in 2016. Before joining FactCheck in 2016, Spencer reported for Delaware Online, where her articles included puff and fluff pieces about Joe Biden and his potential Presidential run in 2015. Whether intentional or perhaps due to some personal bias, Spencer’s false fact-checking in 2020, assisted the Biden campaign’s efforts to label critics of Joe Biden as promoters of false information.