On Sunday, former President Biden’s handlers made the inexplicable decision to throw him out in public — nevermind that it was to the friendly New York Times — to address allegations of pervasive autopen usage during his presidency. Of course, Biden made it worse by admitting, in The Times’s summation, he “did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons.”
And, in a transcript of Biden’s answers, he came off as rather incoherent.
Despite all that, the major broadcast networks of ABC, CBS, and NBC completely ignored this on their flagship Monday morning news shows. This squared with a June 23 study by our Geoff Dickens that found zeroes across the board on Biden’s use of autopen.
Axios’s Alex Thompson pulled out the key passage:
Unsurprisingly, Times reporters Charlie Savage and Tyler Pager tried to put a positive spin on this for Biden, most notably their headline and subhead: “Biden Says He Made the Clemency Decisions That Were Recorded With Autopen; Donald J. Trump and his allies have begun investigations to support their claims that Joseph R. Biden Jr. was incapacitated and his staff conspired to take presidential actions in his name.”
Our friend and 2022 MRC Bulldog Award winner Drew Holden also took Savage and Pager to task for their misleading story structure with the key admission of Biden being unaware of certain pardons coming buried in paragraphs 32 and 36, respectively:
In paragraph 37, The Times noted “the Bureau of Prisons kept providing additional information about specific inmates, resulting in small changes to the list” and “[r]ather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the autopen, which they saw as a routine procedure, the aide said.”
The excerpted transcript of Biden’s answers was quite something, giving the hypen a high-intensity workout:
Additionally, while CNN has covered it with full segments on CNN News Central and Inside Politics, MSNBC has only made one direct mention of it as of this blog’s publication.
MSNBC’s only nod came in breaking away from President Trump’s Oval Office remarks to the press, blasting this as a generational scandal. 10:00 a.m. Eastern host Ana Cabrera awkwardly broke in to steer matters back to Ukraine, but not before first insisting: “Just a reminder, since we’re talking about autopen, autopen is legal. President Trump uses it.”
In contrast, ABC, CBS, and NBC combined for nine minutes and 28 seconds on the split inside the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement over the Jeffrey Epstein case.
But that wasn’t all they did to waste time. ABC’s Good Morning America spent two minute and 12 seconds on the latest attempt by the Menendez brothers to be released from prison and an absurd three minutes and 15 seconds on the alleged new trend of buying second-hand vacations.
Over on CBS Mornings, they had 81 seconds educating viewers on Bastille Day and then NBC’s Today gave nearly four minutes (3:58) to reminding viewers of the benefits to rewards programs at casual and fast-casual restaurant chains.
