It’s not just the gaffes. President Joe Biden has a serious and well-documented problem when it comes to repeatedly telling outright lies.
We at NewsBusters wanted to look at some of the most egregious fibs Biden has made just during his administration and how much time (if any) the broadcast networks devoted to knocking them down.
Of the ten lies MRC analysts looked into, not one was covered by the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) evening and morning shows.
We also wanted to see how two of the liberal media’s fact-checking outlets (The Washington Post Fact Checker and PolitiFact) rated the Biden lies. If both rated Biden poorly it makes it even more egregious that the networks refused to report on the lie.
Here’s a quick montage of some of the lies by NewsBusters Media Editor Bill D’Agostino:
The following is a list of 10 Lies the Nets Are Letting Biden Get Away With:
Biden’s Press Secretary Advanced Lie About Him Having No Knowledge of Hunter’s Business Dealings
On September 21, 2019 Joe Biden claimed “I’ve never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” It’s a lie that has been disproven by a bounty of evidence found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. While that fib was made before he took office it’s a claim that has been advanced by his staff.
On April 5, 2022 Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked then-Press Secretary Jen Psaki: “The President has said that he never spoke to his son about his overseas business dealings. Is that still the case?” Psaki responded: “Yes.”
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: On November 23, 2022 the Post’s Glenn Kessler summarized all the claims of the President knowing about Hunter’s business deals as “strained:” “Any potential connection between Joe Biden and his son’s business dealings, thus far, is especially strained.”
PolitiFact Rating: No Rating.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Biden Lies About Passing Student Loan Legislation
On October 24, 2022 The National Review reported the following:
In an interview released Sunday, President Biden stated that his student-debt forgiveness initiative had already been “passed by a vote or two” although it hasn’t been voted on in Congress. Biden issued an executive order in late August “forgiving” up to $10,000 in student debt for individuals making less than $125,000 per year and up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients in the same income category. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the unilateral move could cost taxpayers as much as $400 billion.…
The 8th Circuit Court of Appeals temporarily blocked Biden’s student-bailout order last Friday in response to a lawsuit filed by a group of Republican-led states.
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: No Rating.
PolitiFact Rating: False.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Biden Falsely Claims His Son Beau Died in Iraq
On November 1, 2022 the New York Post reported the following:
President Biden incorrectly said during a stump speech Tuesday that his late son Beau lost his life while serving in Iraq — at least the second time in a matter of weeks the commander-in-chief has made the false claim.
Biden was discussing inflation, Medicare and Social Security in South Florida when he first confused the Iraq War with Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, then said he was thinking of the earlier conflict because of his son.
“They talk about inflation … inflation is a worldwide problem right now because of a war in Iraq and the impact on oil and what Russia’s doing … excuse me, the war in Ukraine,” the president said. “I’m thinking about Iraq because that’s where my son died.”
Beau Biden passed away after a battle with brain cancer in May 2015 at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., at the age of 46. He returned from a yearlong deployment to Iraq in September 2009, where he served as a military lawyer in a Delaware National Guard brigade.
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: No Rating.
PolitiFact Rating: No Rating.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Biden Claims Multiple Times He was Arrested Trying to See Nelson Mandela
On October 25, 2022, the New York Post reported:
President Biden again claimed over the weekend that he was detained by South African authorities while trying to visit Nelson Mandela in prison in the 1970s — despite admitting just last month that his telling of the story was false.
“I got stopped when I was a young senator trying to see Nelson Mandela in South Africa,” Biden said during a forum broadcast Sunday by left-wing outlet NowThis News. “Afterward he heard, and when he got released, he came to see me in Washington and he walked up to me [and] said, ‘Thank you.’”
…
Biden said at least three times while running for president in 2020 that he was arrested trying to visit Mandela before admitting that wasn’t the case on Sept. 16 of this year, during a visit from South Africa’s current president. Biden’s tall tale got national attention in February 2020, when he told a South Carolina audience that he “had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Mandela] on Robbens [sic] Island.”
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: Four Pinocchios.
PolitiFact Rating: Pants on Fire.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.*
*Although it’s outside this study’s time period of Biden’s presidency, it should be noted that prior to Biden becoming President the Mandela lie was featured in this 30-second Eye Opener montage, as aired on the February 27, 2020 edition of CBS This Morning:
UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: Joe Biden has been getting skewered for repeating a claim that he was once arrested in South Africa on a trip to see Nelson Mandela.
STEPHEN COLBERT: Biden was not arrested but he was separated from his party at the airport. [Impersonating Joe Biden] “Nelson Mandela was in prison for twenty-seven years but one time I lost sight of my coworkers in a Delta terminal. So I get it. Hey, where did you go? Help, I’m arrested. Wait, there you are. There you are. You’re gone. Where are you now? You’re back.”
Biden’s Debunked Amtrak Tall-Tale
On January 30, 2023 the Daily Mail reported the following:
Joe Biden repeated an untrue story for at least the eighth time on Monday claiming an Amtrak conductor congratulated him for racking up one million miles on the train commuting between Wilmington, Delaware and Washington, D.C.
The president has told this fabricated story since at least his 2020 presidential campaign.
Standing beside Maryland Governor Wes Moore, Biden told the often-repeated story as part of his remarks kicking off a new project to replace a train tunnel in Baltimore built in the 1870s.
Biden, 80, said a conductor gave him kudos for logging more miles on Amtrak than on Air Force Two as vice president.
“I was going home as a United States senator – as vice president – and one of the conductors said to me, ‘Hey Joe, big deal, a million – whatever – 200 –.’ He said, ‘You’ve traveled over a million miles on Amtrak,’ Biden recalled.
‘I said, ‘How the hell do you know that?’ And they added it up there,” Biden recalled, even though fact-checks have shown this is not true.
Biden, who has been called “Amtrak Joe” due to his affinity for the train, has told the story several times of his Amtrak conductor friend Angelo Negri, who is at the center of the story. Negri, however, had been dead for more than a year – and retired for more than two decades – before the earliest moment Biden could have had this conversation as vice president.
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: No Rating.
PolitiFact Rating: No Rating.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Biden Claims Price of Gas is Down From “Over $5 When I Took Office”
On October 28, 2022 FoxNews.com reported:
President Biden was blasted Thursday for what many called “outright lies” after he asserted that gas prices were $5 per gallon when he took office.
Biden appeared at the Onondaga Community College’s SRC Arena in Syracuse, New York, to praise a $100 billion commitment from Micron to build a massive semiconductor in the area. During his comments, he turned to praising his own administration for its work on infrastructure and the economy.
One of the successes he touted was falling gas prices, which he claimed have dropped to $3.39 per gallon on average. This, he alleged, was down from over $5 a gallon “when [he] took office.””And because of the action we’ve taken, gas prices are declining. We’re down $1.25 since the peak this summer and there been falling for the last three weeks as well, and adding up real savings for families today. The most common price of gas in America is $3.39, down from over five dollars when I took office.”
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: Bottomless Pinocchio.
PolitiFact Rating: False.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Biden Claims He Was Raised by Puerto Ricans
On October 3, 2022 the New York Post reported the following:
President Biden told an audience in Puerto Rico Monday that “I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically” — despite the fact that only about 2,000 people of Puerto Rican ancestry lived in Delaware when he was launching his career five decades ago.
Biden has a habit of inflating his personal connection to audiences and made the claim while pledging Hurricane Fiona recovery aid during a trip to Ponce on the island’s southern coast.
“We have a very, in relative terms, a large Puerto Rican population in Delaware relative to our population,” Biden said in an unscripted aside. “We have the eighth-largest black population of the country and between all minorities, we have 20% of our state [that] is minority. And so I — I was sort of raised in the Puerto Rican community at home, politically.”
Biden, 79, was first elected to the US Senate in 1972 — two years after winning election to the New Castle, Del., County Council.
According to the 1970 US Census, Delaware had about 2,154 people who were either born in Puerto Rico or descended from Puerto Rican parents — roughly 0.39% of the First State’s population of nearly 550,000 at the time.
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: No Rating.
PolitiFact Rating: No Rating.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Biden Lies About Naval Academy Appointment
On June 14, 2022 the New York Post reported:
President Biden claimed last month at the Naval Academy’s graduation ceremony that he was appointed to the military school in 1965 by the late Sen. J. Caleb Boggs (R-Del.), but a search of Boggs’ archives has failed to turn up evidence to back the claim. Curators at the Delaware Historical Association in Wilmington were able to find records of Boggs’ academy nominations for just one year in the early 1960s and could not locate records for either 1965 or the more plausible year 1961.
That means, barring evidence from an unlikely third party, that it’s probable only Biden — who often shares incorrect or exaggerated memories — can prove his claim.
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: No Rating.
PolitiFact Rating: No Rating.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Biden Claims You Couldn’t Even “Buy a Cannon” When Second Amendment Was Passed
On February 3, 2022 FoxNews.com reported:
President Joe Biden said Thursday that “no amendment is absolute” while discussing the Second Amendment and repeated a debunked claim that cannons were prohibited when the amendment was passed.
“There’s no violation of the Second Amendment right,” Biden said in New York City while discussing background checks and other ways to address gun crime. “We talk like. There’s no amendment that’s absolute. When the amendment was passed it didn’t say anybody can own a gun, any kind of gun, and any kind of weapon. You couldn’t buy a cannon when this amendment was passed so there’s no reason why you should be able to buy certain assault weapons. But that’s another issue.”
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: Four Pinocchios.
PolitiFact Rating: False.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Biden Exaggerates How Many Times He’s Been to Afghanistan and Iraq
On December 16, 2022, FoxNews.com reported:
President Biden was speaking at a town hall event with veterans Friday when he repeated a false claim about the number of times he’s visited Iraq and Afghanistan.
“I’ve been in and out, not as, obviously, a combatant, but in and out of Afghanistan, Iraq, and those areas 38, 39 times as vice president, only twice as president,” Biden told his audience….The president exaggerated the number of times he’s visited the Middle East, which he has done before. In his first State of the Union address, Biden falsely claimed he had traveled to Iraq and Afghanistan “over 40 times.” The actual number is closer to 21 times, according to a PolitiFact fact-check that rated his claim “false” in March.
Washington Post Fact Checker Rating: No Rating.
PolitiFact Rating: False.
ABC, CBS, NBC evening and morning news coverage: 0 seconds.
Is there any doubt that the broadcast networks would let a Republican president get away with the number of lies — in some cases repeated lies — they’ve let President Biden slide on by with. Imagine how much worse Biden’s already low approval rating would be if the broadcast nets actually exposed how many fibs, fabrications and tall-tales Biden spouts? This is just another example of how deep in the tank ABC, CBS and NBC are in for the Biden administration.
