CBS News is playing clean-up after it got called out for falsely claiming a damaging video of President Joe Biden had been “digitally altered.”
In a post on X, CBS News said it had deleted a segment on so-called cheap fakes “as it included the wrong version of a video.”
“This version has been updated to include the correct clip and label on the edited video,” it added.
The update comes after CBS News aired a segment that falsely claimed a video of the president seemingly wandering off at the G-7 before being retrieved by the Italian prime minister had somehow been “digitally altered.”
Rhona Tarrant, the executive editor of CBS News Confirmed discussed the prevalence of “cheap fakes,” including allegedly the video from the G-7 summit.
However, the segment featured the same video that was shared by the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) X account, the one that quickly went viral last week.
It was not digitally altered or cut, and viewers could see Biden appearing to communicate with a skydiver who had just participated in a demonstration, despite the label.
After the network was pilloried for falsely labeling the video digitally altered, it re-edited the segment.
Instead of featuring the video that was shared by the RNC, it shared a video — without attribution — that it claimed was an example of a viral “cheap fake” video of Biden. The new video, which allegedly went viral in conservative media, was cropped with the sides blurred out so you could not see the skydiver.
There may be some cropped videos of the moment. But if you search for Biden wandering off, the video that comes up is the one with the full context. That’s the one the vast majority of people are going to see.
This is incredible. In a segment about how dangerous and pernicious so-called cheap fake videos, the network just ran with the White House’s talking points to protect Biden and falsely labeled an unedited, viral video “altered.” And when it got called out, it replaced the video with an actual cheap fake.
