The media has long downplayed and softened President Biden’s decades-long history of falsehoods, as most recently evidenced by a euphemism-filled New York Times report that referred to outright fabrications and lies as "folklore" stories with "factual edges shaved off."
The Times finally discovered Biden’s trouble with the truth on Tuesday but was widely mocked for using mealy-mouthed language in the report.
The Times noted Biden has lied about being "raised in the Puerto Rican community at home," his academic record, his life story, being arrested when protesting civil rights, being arrested in South Africa, pinning a Silver Star on a Navy captain and even the timeline when he rode on Amtrak to visit his sick mother, among other things. He’s told other unbelievable stories that the Times failed to mention, such as the claim he confronted a gang leader named "Corn Pop" in the 1960s.
But instead of flatly calling Biden a liar, the Times said he "embellished narratives, sometimes only loosely based on the facts, to weave together his political identity."
"Mr. Biden’s folksiness can veer into folklore, with dates that don’t quite add up and details that are exaggerated or wrong, the factual edges shaved off to make them more powerful for audiences," the Times reported.
The Times also claimed former President Trump "lied constantly" and "Biden’s fictions are nowhere near that scale" and took the Republicans-pounce approach by declaring, "Biden’s critics have seized on his falsehoods to depict him as either a purposeful liar or a forgetful old man."
Some of Biden’s dishonest statements are political, such as the time he claimed the economy had "zero percent inflation" during July when it was actually 8.5%. Other times, they’re wildly exaggerated tidbits about his personal life. He often botches key details, misremembers dates and sometimes seems to just make up or embellish tales about his past.
He has falsely claimed he was "appointed" to the Naval Academy, dishonestly said he was arrested in South Africa, misleadingly bragged he was arrested during the civil rights movement in the United Stated, inaccurately claimed he was once a professional truck driver and oddly claimed he was "sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home."
Biden’s lies are sometimes repeated multiple times, often growing bigger with each exaggerated version of the actual event. He declared this week that "everything was ruined" from the basement to the attic and "we almost lost a couple firefighters" when lightning struck his home 15 years ago.
However, the Associated Press at the time reported that "no one was injured" in the "small fire that was contained to the kitchen" and under control within 20 minutes.
Greg Price, a senior digital strategist for X Strategies, put a spotlight on Biden’s fire falsehood by sharing footage of the apparent exaggeration. He believes "Biden has spent his entire career lying" but regularly gets a pass from the mainstream media.
"The reason he gets away with it is because, contrary to what Chris Cilizza once said, reporters do in fact root for a side," Price told Fox News Digital, referring to the CNN’s reliably liberal Cillizza famously claiming that "reporters don’t root for a side. Period."
Despite Cilizza’s often-lampooned 2016 claim, many seem to think the media favors Democrats. Alyssa Farah Griffin, who plays the role of token conservative on ABC News’ "The View," recently claimed Biden’s constant gaffes are "endearing" because "people do make mistakes."
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Fox News contributor and "Come On, Man" author Joe Concha believes coverage would be "whatever exceeds 24/7 pious outrage" if a Republican said something so demonstrably false as Biden’s claim that "everything was ruined" when his kitchen caught fire.
"Instead, it’s silence of the lambs," Concha told Fox News Digital.
"He constantly lies with impunity and for no apparent reason. He said he finished at the top of his law school class. He finished near the bottom. He had to drop out of the 1988 presidential race due to plagiarism. He keeps saying he was arrested during civil rights protests. He said he was arrested trying to see Nelson Mandela. He insists inflation is at or near zero percent. He says we’re not in a recession. And he says the border is closed," Concha continued. "Yet, fact-checkers either ignore the lies or try to defend them."
Media Research Center founder Brent Bozell was among the critics of the New York Times piece, blasting Biden as a "pathological liar" that can’t be saved by the left-wing newspaper.
Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer agreed, saying the Times piece was "the most cleaned up, soft landing a journalist can spin" on behalf of any politician.
"In the real world, the headline would be ‘Biden Frequently Caught Lying,’" Fleischer wrote.
The Times is hardly the only journalism institution willing to overlook, downplay or soften Biden’s history of telling tall tales.
The Washington Post recently declared, "After four years of a presidency that swamped Americans with a gusher of false and misleading claims, the Joe Biden era has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts — one that features frequent spin and obfuscation or exaggeration, with the occasional canard."
The mainstream media’s fact-checker industry has regularly turned a blind eye.
Politifact, a product of The Poynter Institute, appears more concerned with making sure critics of Biden are held accountable than the White House itself.
During Biden’s first 20 months in office, there were 58 pieces published by Politifact to fact-check the president compared to a staggering 338 pieces designed to fact-check Biden critics, according to the Media Research Center's NewsBusters.
CNN's fact-checker Daniel Dale, who has gone weeks and months at a time without publishing articles on Biden claims, wrote earlier this year that, in 2021, "Unlike his uniquely dishonest predecessor, Biden did not bury fact-checkers in a daily avalanche of serial falseness. Biden never came close to making a dozen false claims in a single speech, let alone five dozen false claims in one address, as Trump once did."
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New York Times fact-checker Linda Qiu was one of the authors of the piece informing readers that Biden has "embellished narratives" throughout the course of his career. NewsBusters executive editor Tim Graham noticed that despite Qiu clearly being aware of Biden’s fabrications, she hasn’t exactly covered them.
"Qiu is the paper’s designated ‘fact checker.’ So if Biden is habitually spinning yarns that unravel, she must be busy with Biden checks, right? No. She hasn’t ‘fact checked’ Biden since August 20, 2021 on the Afghanistan withdrawal fiasco under an extremely mild headline: ‘Clarifying Biden’s Take of Evacuation," Graham wrote.
"A peek at her archive of articles since then includes at least 14 fact checks of Republicans and/or conservatives. This 14-to-1 imbalance in target selection would remind you of PolitiFact – which makes sense, because that's where Qiu worked before joining the Times," Graham continued. "This dramatically imbalanced pattern of targeting explains why conservatives are hostile to ‘fact checkers,’ not to facts."
Fox News contributor Deroy Murdoch has seen enough.
"Joe Biden frequently recounts stories about phantom Amtrak conductors, imaginary residential infernos, and baseball glory that he never achieved," Murdoch told Fox News Digital.
"Biden could invent these non-events to make himself look good. In that case, he is a pathological liar. But, even worse, maybe he really believes that these non-events actually took place," he continued. "If so, then he is living a life of total fantasy. Liar or fabulist? The American people need neither in the White House. Joe Biden cannot be replaced as Commander-in-Chief soon enough."
Fox News’ David Rutz contributed to this report.
