Editing Joe Biden

The White House's attempt at transparency is more like misdirection.

Before Joe Biden took office he committed to giving it to the American people straight, tweeting in December 2020 that the “Biden-Harris administration will always… [p]romote trust, transparency, common purpose, and accountability in our government.”

“No malarky,” in other words. Over and over, the White House has repeated a “promoting transparency” mantra in a variety of fact sheets, executive orders, and proposed legislation. To a country used to daily whoppers from the previous occupant of the White House, this sounded like a dream come true. Unfortunately it doesn’t match up with the reality of how the Biden White House reports the president’s own words.

At first glance it may appear that the White House is transparent to a fault, almost pedantic in its zeal for accuracy in correcting President Biden’s misstatements. In one stretch from August 8-15, 2023, the White House issued no fewer than 12 corrections to Biden’s various statements and remarks. In September 2023, White House transcripts of Biden appearances included a full 32 bracketed clarifications. [see Editor’s Note¹]

The types of errors run the gamut. Getting numbers correct, for instance, seems particularly challenging for the president. In July 2023 in remarks about the pandemic, Biden said, “[W]e have over 100 people dead.  That’s 100 empty chairs around the kitchen table.” As the correction notes, the death toll from Covid was around one million [highlighting added here and following].

At the end of September 2023, when talking about the deficit (more on that later,) Mr. Biden made the dreaded billion/trillion error… twice. (He also picked a poor time to add the phrase “we can walk and chew gum at the same time” after making the double error.)

In August 2023, President Biden struggled to get out statistics on the help FEMA was providing after the wildfire disaster in Hawaii. 

Speaking of FEMA, another area where the president struggles is names. On three different occasions in August 2023, Mr. Biden referred to Administrator “Griswell”. However, Biden’s FEMA administrator since 2021 is named Deanne Criswell, and the transcripts dutifully, if somewhat painfully, correct the record each time.

On one of those same occasions, the president was close but no cigar when it came to naming a couple of local officials in the audience:

Even when the president inadvertently mispronounces a word, using the wrong phrase, or invents a new one (such as “uninflation,”) the unrelenting editors are right there with their virtual red pen.

And then there are instances where slips of the tongue result in dramatic changes in meaning, as in July 2023 when the president referred to Senator Tommy Tuberville’s hold on military nominations due to the military’s abortion policy as “blocking more than 300 military operations with his extreme political agenda.” While Tuberville’s actions may be considered extreme by some, blocking “military operations” is obviously not the same as blocking nominations.

Then in August 2023, the president claimed his administration had “cut the debt by $1.7 trillion.” But the fact is, the debt of the US government has not been “cut” in two decades. The White House duly noted the president’s error: he meant cut the deficit, not the debt.

The president made the claim again the following day. Again, the White House corrected the transcript. Remarkably, the president repeated his false assertion a third time on September 4, 2023.

But in this case, even the correction is disinformation. Glenn Kessler, Fact Checker of the Washington Post, in April 2023 awarded the president a “Bottomless Pinocchio” for his claims [30 times] of $1.7 trillion in deficit reduction. But correcting “debt” to “deficit” is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel. While giving the impression of transparency, the White House is in fact promoting an alternate falsehood.

And while mispronunciations and verbal slips are routinely caught and highlighted by White House editors, deeper and glaring factual errors are ignored. In September, President Biden recalled his post-9/11 visit to New York City, telling service members, first responders, and their families in Alaska of his shock standing there at ground zero the “next day.” 

When asked for documentation of this visit to New York by FactCheck.org, however, the best the White House could do was to provide a photo of a visit by Biden and others on September 20, 2001. Despite this tacit admission that the president’s words were mistaken, his false claim remains in the transcript.

Even when President Biden makes a claim that is contradicted by a previous claim, the White House lets him slide. In June 2023, he claimed to have “appointed more African American women to the… federal bench than any other — every other president combined.”

As FactCheck.org points out, the claim is false, with the president’s actual total coming in at 31 of 88. FactCheck notes that the president’s claim is true relative to federal appellate courts which Biden has attempted to note on other occasions (again requiring clarifying statements from White House editors.) And yet the original fact-challenged statement stands.

In January 2023, CNN fact-checked a Biden speech on the economy. Among other things, the president misrepresented COVID vaccinations under Donald Trump, wildly overstated infrastructure projects, made a couple of false claims about taxes, got the year wrong when a prescription drug cost cap for seniors would take effect, and repeated his misleading claims about the federal deficit and debt. The White House, however, only managed to correct the infrastructure project number (700,000 to 7,000) and a reputed billionaire tax rate (3 percent to 8 percent, still a misleading figure.)

The following month, Politifact reviewed the president’s 2023 State of the Union address. Biden made a false claim about employee noncompete agreements, misrepresented his administration's record on job creation, once again brought out the old saw about the deficit, and made exaggerated claims about Medicare and drugs price negotiation. The speech as posted by the White House, however, contains no corrections or adjustments. The remarks are published on the website “as prepared for delivery” - the false claims were built right into the speech.

The White House’s incessant copying-editing of the president’s words and scores of trifling adjustments to his remarks merely serve to distract from the more serious problem of misinformation his administration regularly disseminates. Close observers of the large national newspapers may recognize this trick. “Corrections” and “editor’s notes” focus on a particular class of falsehoods–ages, dates, numbers, and the like. Black-and-white falsehoods are corrected when the author is caught dead to rights, but often in the narrowest way possible. And the biggest lies–of framing, of context, of assumption and insinuation, of question-begging and special pleading and so many other fallacies–are let stand, as if the fixing of mere typos is alone supposed to establish the paper’s bona fides on other, graver matters.

On the surface, this White House’s policing of the president’s remarks may seem admirable. But policing is hardly adequate if it consists largely of issuing parking tickets yet winks at grand theft auto. Partial transparency is in reality no transparency at all. And that’s no malarky.

1. Editor’s Note: Original text of the article read, “In September 2023, a White House transcript of a single Biden appearance included a full 32 bracketed clarifications.” The text was changed to indicate 32 referred to the entire month.