Even after his disastrously doddering debate performance Thursday night, President Joe Biden still has his fans on public television. Friday’s edition of Amanpour & Co., which airs originally on CNN International, stitched together various thin defenses of the Biden presidency and condemnations of Donald Trump, while host Christiane Amanpour’s anti-Trump partisanship was even more ham-handed than usual.
The original version actually broke into the hour-long coverage for 20-something minutes of a live Biden campaign rally in North Carolina.
Notice how Amanpour tried to counteract Biden’s undeniably pathetic debate performance in every line from her introduction onward, while hailing CNN’s hopelessly slanted media fact-checks as utter truth, after Biden threw a big post-debate hint in the media’s direction at a campaign rally.
Host, Christiane Amanpour: ….In a televised presidential debate, optics are everything, but the devil is also in the detail. Last night, a fumbling Joe Biden faced a serial liar, Donald Trump, in the first live debate. Today, Democrats are in damage-control mode and Republicans are jubilant. But speaking to supporters in North Carolina after the debate, President Biden appeared unfazed.
President Joe Biden: The choice in this election is simple. Donald Trump will destroy this democracy; I will defend it…Did you see Trump last night? My guess he said, I mean this sincerely, a new record for the most lies told in a single debate.
Amanpour took the bait: And he's right! According to CNN's fact-check, Donald Trump was responsible for more than three times the number of falsehoods than Biden….America now faces a choice -- a visibly aging man who failed to live up to that moment, or an authoritarian-leaning convicted felon, facing even more courtroom trials ahead….
Amanpour talked to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, and Marc Lotter, director of strategic communications for Trump’s 2020 campaign. She wasn’t done with the slanted fact-checking, asking Lotter to respond to a clip of CNN’s fact-checking reporter Daniel Dale on “the staggering number of false claims from Former President Trump. On first count, [CNN Anchor Erin Burnett], I counted at least 30, 30 false claims.”
Of course, Amanpour ignored Biden’s own whoppers, like his claim he’s not in favor of late-term abortions, even though the 2020 Democratic Party platform has no restrictions on abortion; falsely stating the border patrol union endorsed him, falsely claiming no terrorists were infiltrating America under his watch and that no U.S. soldiers were killed during his term, or that Trump told Americans to drink bleach to cure Covid.
Amanpour continued smugly:
But listen, 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists have warned that a second Trump term would reignite inflation. They say Joe Biden's economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump's. Also, as you know, Marc, and I'm sure you've been reading these, he, Donald Trump, had a meeting with executives just in the last few days, and they said remarkably meandering, couldn't keep a straight thought and was all over the map. And it's also been pointed out by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld at Yale that not a single person among Forbes 100 CEOs has donated to Trump's campaign. So, these are facts. How does that, Marc, make him better on the economy?
What a strange argument against a Republican, that not enough greedy CEOs are financing his campaign!
Lotter retorted ably: "Well, the Nobel laureates were wrong when they predicted that he was going to ruin the economy in 2016, 2017. I put their value about the same as I do with the 51 intelligence officers that lied to cover [sic] the Hunter Biden laptop story."
Note: The PBS version has been edited. The original CNNI version pre-empted itself for live coverage of a Biden campaign rally in North Carolina, which left Amanpour enthusiastic afterward, according to the CNN transcript: “That is what you call rallying the troops. That is a redo.”
