Amid the press coverage of a variety of recent video clips showing Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden’s apparent physical and mental decline—standing motionless in the middle of a number of dignitaries swaying and bobbing to some music, wandering off in the middle of a parachute team demonstration, being taken by the wrist and led off the stage—there comes Biden’s Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre’s full throated and angry denunciation of the video clips as cheap fakes and deep fakes.
Among the press’ snark corps commentary ridiculing Jean-Pierre’s claim there were a few suggestions that were more serious.
The least among the more serious is Guy Benson’s unsubstantiated denial:
But it’s literal misinformation to pretend the videos themselves are fake. They are not.
Based on what evidence, Benson?
Some more serious questions include these:
Senator Mike Lee (R, UT):
Wait, exactly which videos we’ve all seen—of Biden freezing or looking lost—are deepfakes?
Stephen L Miller:
A reporter needs to genuinely ask her what she thinks a deep fake is[.]
This line of questioning badly lacking, however, which is all too typical of today’s cute sound bite-driven media. A reporter—a myriad of reporters—also need to ask (to get back to Benson’s failure from the right) for the specific data that shows the videos to be deep fakes, or cheap fakes, or in any way altered other than—perhaps—being clipped out of longer videos showing more of Biden’s behavior both before and after the clips in question.
Maybe the lack of calls for hard evidence—and Benson’s evidence-free claim—is of a piece with what passes for today’s journalism: sound bites don’t have room for facts.