Media Fact-Checkers Bend Over Backward to Cover for Joe Biden After He's Caught in Major Lie
The establishment media and its pro-Democrat fact-checkers covered for President Joe Biden after he falsely claimed Tuesday that there was no coronavirus vaccine when he came into office four weeks ago.
This claim is obviously false. Biden received both of his doses of the vaccine before his Jan. 20 inauguration. Still, that didn’t stop the Democrat from claiming a victory regarding one aspect of the pandemic at his CNN town hall event in Milwaukee.
CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who handled Biden with kid gloves throughout the event, at one point in the event asked the president about the potential availability of hundreds of millions of vaccines by summer. That was when Biden made his false claim.
“It’s one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn’t have when we came into office, but a vaccinator — how do you get the vaccine into someone’s arm?” he said.
Massive lie from Joe Biden on CNN: “we didn’t have [the coronavirus vaccine] when we came into office” pic.twitter.com/tRxvX5QNPK
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) February 17, 2021
The claim is as it appears verbatim on a transcript of the town hall provided by the White House. Biden plainly claimed that there was no vaccine prior to his administration.
Naturally, Biden was quickly called out for the bold falsehood, but not by the one person who could’ve asked him to correct the record instantly: Cooper.
Just as the sun rises in the east, the country’s apparent state media reporters and so-called fact-checkers worked to protect dear leader Biden by either omitting his blatant lie from their reporting or clarifying the remark on his behalf. That was after former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany called Biden out on Twitter.
“Biden says there was no vaccine when he came into office. That is abjectly FALSE. President Trump brought about the fastest vaccine for a novel pathogen in history. How does Joe get away with this?” McEnany rightly pointed out.
Biden says there was no vaccine when he came into office.
That is abjectly FALSE. President Trump brought about the fastest vaccine for a novel pathogen in history.
How does Joe get away with this? pic.twitter.com/OcFeVbQ3At
— Kayleigh McEnany (@kayleighmcenany) February 17, 2021
CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale quickly went to work explaining away the utter lie on Biden’s behalf while sharing McEnany’s tweet.
Biden had said just prior that there were “only” 50 million vaccine doses when he took office. I’m looking into that claim (and a bunch of other claims Biden made tonight), but he clearly wasn’t trying to claim the vaccine did not exist at all under Trump. https://t.co/2EtKDWyR7o
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) February 17, 2021
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler was particularly incensed by McEnany’s strong condemnation of his Democratic overlord. He went on a tweeting spree to defend Biden and to tell people their own ears were lying to them.
Kessler went as far as describing the Biden remark as a “verbal stumble” and a “typical Biden gaffe.”
It was a verbal stumble, a typical Biden gaffe, as he had already mentioned 50 million doses being available when he took office. Ex Trump officials should especially cool the outrage meter, as it just looks silly. https://t.co/HFjH01lXgH
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) February 17, 2021
Biden said on CNN: “it’s one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn’t have when we came into office, but a vaccinator — how do you get the vaccine into someone’s arm?” Yep, that’s wrong. Sounds bad. But did he mean it?…
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) February 17, 2021
B) Is it different than what he said before? Yes, 1/26: “We want to give credit to everyone involved in this vaccine effort and the prior administration and the science community and the medical sphere — for getting the program off the ground. And that credit is absolutely due.”
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) February 17, 2021
I know it’s fun to snip a clip and act outraged on social media. But what’s more telling is if a politician over and over says the same falsehood, day after day, no matter how often he or she has been fact-checked. No going to mention any names, of course.
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) February 17, 2021
Translation: If a person utters a false statement and Kessler agrees with them, they misspoke. If they are not ideologically aligned with him and the rest of the leftist information filters, they are lying.
According to Kessler, fact-checkers will now only look for “context” and “patterns” when doing their jobs, which they’ve never been good at. Kessler would have done himself a service to remain mum like the other activists in the corporate media, as then he could have at least pleaded ignorance as opposed to fraudulence.
The elitist media’s phony fact-checkers were not the only ones to step in and defend Biden from his own words. Former Obama administration Bureau of Ocean Energy Management Director Michael Bromwich called the Biden lie a “slip of the tongue” and attacked McEnany.
He “gets away with it” because it was so clearly a slip of the tongue. This is rich coming from someone who lied every day in every way to serve a boss who did the same. https://t.co/uEO5kw8Ypu
— Michael R. Bromwich (@mrbromwich) February 17, 2021
Later Tuesday night, in an apparent attempt to change the subject and turn the tables, CNN host Jake Tapper lobbed his own claim at McEnany — using an anonymous quote to link her to the QAnon conspiracy theory while completely ignoring the Biden lie about vaccines.
From a former WH colleague of McEnany’s: “This is 100% meant to stir up the qanon crowd. Awful.” https://t.co/jTqIRwEyKn
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 17, 2021
The gaslighting from the establishment media truly never ends.
Where are the left’s reliable fact-checking websites Snopes and PolitiFact? As of the time of this article’s publication, neither has touched Biden’s false claim.
Biden is a lifelong plagiarist with issues telling the truth. He’s spent five decades on the government dole while previously failing in two presidential bids before the establishment media and the entire corrupted system finally dragged him to the White House last month. He’s apparently never come across a good thing he didn’t wish to take credit for, and per what we’ve come to expect, the state media let him get away with it Tuesday.
UPDATE, Feb. 18, 2021: Following the publication of this article, the fact-checking outlet PolitiFact posted an article titled “In Context: What Joe Biden said about the vaccine supply he found when he took office.” After citing examples of Biden critics lambasting the president’s claim that “we didn’t have [the vaccine] when we came into office,” PolitiFact argued that “These are examples of Biden’s political opponents taking words out of context.”
“You can judge his meaning for yourself, but it’s clear to us that Biden didn’t mean there were no vaccines available before he took office,” PolitiFact said. This seems to be a questionable claim, however. Biden did indeed say “we didn’t have” the vaccine when he took office. His words were clear, despite PolitiFact’s apparent attempt to argue that the words he said actually meant something else. This does not mean that this was anything more than a gaffe, only that a reasonable person would, after hearing this statement from the president, assume he was asserting vaccines were not available on Jan. 20, 2021.
In fact, even Glenn Kessler, the editor and chief “fact-checker” at the liberal-leaning Washington Post, acknowledged on Twitter that Biden’s remark “was a verbal stumble, a typical Biden gaffe.”
That being said, PolitiFact is correct in noting the additional context to Biden’s remarks, which The Western Journal is including in this update.
“We have — we came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available. We have now — by the end of July, we’ll have over 600 million doses — enough to vaccinate every single American,” Biden said, according to a White House transcript of his remarks.
“Here, look, we — what we did — we got into office and found out the supply — there was no backlog. I mean, there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 10 million doses a day that were available,” the president also said.
Both those statements came before Biden’s assertion that “we didn’t have [the vaccine] when we came into office,” thus suggesting that the president was at least somewhat aware that a vaccine had, in fact, been developed and authorized before he took office. However, the gaffe-prone Biden made the now-infamous claim anyway.
While it is important to recognize Biden’s remarks in their full context, it is inaccurate to argue, as PolitiFact did, that Biden’s words did not mean what they sounded like they meant.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
