Fox News's shamelessly dishonest attack on President Biden
They deceptively edited a video to make it seem as though Biden said something racially insensitive, when in fact he did no such thing.
This morning I woke up to a number of DMs asking me why I hadn’t tweeted about a gaffe President Biden purportedly made during a speech on Thursday, when he allegedly referred to legendary baseball pitcher Satchel Paige as a “great negro.”
The comment was covered by right-wing outlets like Fox News and The Daily Wire as evidence Biden had said something racially insensitive and isn’t being held to the same standard as former President Trump. A clip of it went viral many times over on right-wing Twitter.
So I decided to do a bit of research. Perhaps unsurprisingly, what I discovered is that this particular attack on Biden is as dishonest as it gets.
First, some background: Biden’s remark came during a Veterans Day speech while he was honoring former US Ambassador to Hungary Donald Blinken, an Army veteran who’s also the father of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Biden, joking about being 78 years old and the fact that Donald Blinken was celebrating his 96th birthday, said, “I’ve adopted the attitude of the great negro at the time, pitcher in the negro leagues, who went on to become a great pitcher in the pros — in Major League Baseball — after Jackie Robinson. His name was Satchel Paige.”
He continued:
And Satchel Paige on his 47th birthday pitched a win against Chicago. And all the press went in and said, ‘Satch is amazing. Forty-seven years old. No one’s ever, ever pitched a win at age 47. How do you feel about being 47?’ He said, ‘Boys, that’s not how I look at it.’ And they said, ‘How do you look at it, Satch? And he said, ‘I look at it this way: How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were?’
Interpreted in context, there is absolutely nothing wrong with what Biden said. His comment about Paige being a “great negro” was merely referring to the fact that he pitched in the negro leagues.
But Fox News smelled an opportunity.