Former Vice President Joe Biden’s recent political ad did not receive high ratings from The Washington Post.
The ad was released on March 3 just before Super Tuesday and it focuses on President Donald Trump and his comments on a variety of issues, including the coronavirus.
According to the Post, two clips of the ad meet the standards for “manipulated” media.
The Post’s fact-checker outlines three ways a video can be considered “manipulated,” including “missing context,” “deceptive” editing, and “deliberately altered.”
Biden opens the ad saying, “I’ll be damned if I am going to lose my country to this man at all.”
The ad then cuts to a montage of Trump’s remarks.
Trump is seen saying, “Coronavirus… This is their new hoax.”
Watch the ad below:
We can't sit by and lose this country to Donald Trump. Today, we take it back — together.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) March 3, 2020
Go vote: https://t.co/Hy8C4n0lUk pic.twitter.com/0YgyJFr9YR
The ad reportedly neglects to include the context surrounding what Trump said in his full speech in regards to the coronavirus.
Trump said during his previous speech, “Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it.”
As the Post notes:
“The full quote shows Trump is criticizing Democratic talking points and the media’s coverage of his administration’s response to coronavirus. He never says that the virus itself is a hoax, and although the Biden camp included the word ‘their,’ the edit does not make clear to whom or what Trump is referring.”
Trump later clarified that he was not calling the virus a hoax. He claimed that he was talking about how the Democrats are responding to the outbreak and the media’s coverage of how the administration is responding to the crisis.
The Washington Post labeled this clip as an example of “deceptive editing.”
The second part that met the standard for manipulated media was when Trump was talking about the “American dream,” where he appears to say in the ad, “The American dream… is dead.”
It neglects to show what Trump immediately says following that statement.
He follows it with, “But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before.” The clip appears to be from 2015, as the Post reports.
The Post labeled this clip as an example of “missing context.”
According to the Post, the ad was labeled with “Four Pinocchios” because of “the seriousness of the coronavirus outbreak, the fact that Trump had clarified his comments on the matter before the ad was released, and the blatant way the Biden camp isolated his remarks about the American Dream.”
This comes shortly after White House Director of Social Media Dan Scavino received a “manipulated media” tag on his tweet of a video of Biden that appeared to be edited — which the Trump campaign has pushed back on.
