<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/19/joe-biden-edited-videos>
"Joe Biden wandered off.
Standing among the west’s major leaders in Italy last week, the US president
turned away, seemingly in confusion, and had to be alerted back to the group to
take a photo – at least, that’s what rightwing media showed.
“WHAT IS BIDEN DOING?” the Republican National Committee’s research Twitter
account wrote.
In actuality, it was nothing strange at all. Biden had turned toward skydivers
and given them a thumbs-up, a broader view of the video showed.
It happened again at a fundraiser with former president Barack Obama. Biden
“appears to freeze up” on stage, the
New York Post wrote, saying Obama had to
lead Biden off the stage in the latest example of the president being “dazed or
confused”.
A zoomed-out video of the incident showed Biden waving and taking in the
applause from the crowd after a lengthy discussion moderated by late-night host
Jimmy Kimmel.
For viewers of rightwing media or social media feeds tailored toward
conservatives, these videos of Biden surface near-daily in an attempt to
underscore one of the president’s key liabilities, his age.
They’re often selectively edited to make Biden look, well, old. They kick off a
series of headlines about how his age or senility is showing, then another
series of headlines about how the videos are created to mislead.
The videos, and the subsequent hand-wringing over them, show how bifurcated
today’s political and social media ecosystems are. Few watch a full speech or a
full newscast, instead getting a quick example of what they missed from an
account they align with. Your view of a given event – of a speech by a
president, or a campaign rally - is colored first, and often predominantly, by
the way it’s presented by the people you follow."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
