Fake Footage
There are a lot of strategies out there for throwing your political opposition off balance. Donald Trump is famous for calling news stories “fake news”…and by making such a broad generalization, listeners tend to first wonder if a story is part of that “fake news” before believing it. Now the Joe Biden team has taken a page out of that playbook, with the mantra “fake footage”.
It is true that some radio and TV hosts create montages of the worst of a given person; the left did it with Trump, the right does it with Biden. Some of it is out of context, or the snippet is brief enough that it creates an image that fits the desired narrative, but may leave the full truth behind. So the Biden team is uniformly calling out “fake footage” and declaring that you can’t trust anything you see because of selective editing.
But the only reason they are using that refrain now is that of late, there have been some particularly bad examples showing Biden in a less than stellar light. Freezing on stage and being pulled back into recognition, literally, by Barack Obama; wandering to the side or off stage at any number of public events; statements from the podium that are nonsensical even with a script.
So any time a reporter asks, Team Biden dismisses the issue with “that’s fake footage” or something similar. The problem is that most of these lately have been very public, full-of-context, incidents. We all saw them. We all winced. We all thought of our own loved ones who had declined in a similar way.
As the saying goes, “who are you going to believe…me, or your lying eyes?” A variation of that was first uttered in a Marx Brothers movie 91 years ago, and repeated often since.
Forget what AI can do; forget claims of “fake footage”. We’re all seeing it, with our own eyes. We know what we believe. How that translates on November 5th is the real question.
