The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports the left-wing media company Civic Media, which airs the Earl Ingram radio show that secured a softball interview with President Biden on July 4, was not happy with how its team accepted White House requests to edit out potentially embarrassing Biden answers in the interview.
"On Monday, July 8th, it was reported to Civic Media management that immediately after the phone interview was recorded, the Biden campaign called and asked for two edits to the recording before it aired. Civic Media management immediately undertook an investigation and determined that the production team at the time viewed the edits as non-substantive and broadcast and published the interview with two short segments removed," the station said in a statement released on Thursday.
The station said it would make the full, unedited interview available online.
The two edits were the removal of Biden’s wild exaggeration that “I have more Blacks in my administration than any other president, all other presidents combined, and in major positions, cabinet positions.” How Trumpian does that sound? "I'm far better on the blacks than Barack Obama"?
And later, in reference to Donald Trump’s call for the death penalty for the Central Park Five, accused of raping a female jogger, they took out Biden bumbling: “I don’t know if they even call for their hanging or not, but he–but they said [...] convicted of murder.”
Philadelphia radio host Andrea Lawful-Sanders resigned her position after admitting on CNN that she “accepted” four questions from the Biden White House for her interview with the president.
Earl Ingram later told ABC News, "Yes, I was given some questions for Biden." He said he was given five questions and asked four of them
Ingram told ABC he didn’t have any objections to pre-scripted questions. "To think that I was gonna get an opportunity to ask any question to the President of the United States, I think, is a bit more than anybody should expect," he said. "Certainly the fact that they gave me this opportunity ... meant a lot to me."
Team Biden can be very demanding in trying to edit out Biden’s bumbles. On Sunday, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about how Biden spokesman T.J. Ducklo energetically tried to get them to remove Biden saying "goodest" in his ABC interview.
After my column posted Saturday morning, T.J. Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesman, emailed me to “flag” that ABC News had updated its transcript to read: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Ducklo asked if I could “tweak” the column and change the word “goodest” to make my piece “consistent with the corrected transcript,” even though the revised version was also gobbledygook.
When I said we would tell our editor what he thought, Ducklo wrote back: “Yeah again, it’s not what I think. It’s what ABC News, who conducted the interview, thinks. I think it would be quite unusual if the Times asserted the president said something that the news organization who conducted the interview says he didn’t say.
All of this presumes that "friendly" media outlets will be "friendly" to a fault. So the Times did make the change! This note was added to the Saturday piece:
Times Opinion revised Mr. Biden’s quote in this column about how he would feel if he loses the election after White House officials and several news organizations contacted ABC on Friday about whether Mr. Biden had said “goodest” or “good as.” ABC’s standards team listened again to the audio and made the change. Mr. Biden’s actual words at that point in the interview were difficult to make out and open to interpretation.
