Journalistic fraud at Politico
A shocking, yet uncovered case
On October 29 of last year, Jonathan Lemire at Politico doctored a Biden quote.
I’ve never seen anything like it. Biden infamously called Trump supporters garbage:
The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His — his demonization of Latinos is unconscionable, and it’s un-American. It’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done, everything we’ve been.
He was talking about a comedian at a Trump rally joking that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage”, playing off its widely reported garbage crisis.
Lemire published a story about 20 minutes after Biden’s comments, which Vice President JD Vance caught later that night (link):
See what Lemire did? He stripped the quote down to the first three words, filled in his own wording, and added “hatred” as part of the quote.
Biden never used the word “hatred”. Lemire added it, and wrapped it in quotes (!) He doctored the quote. He literally fabricated a quote.
That’s plain journalistic fraud.
Yet the media has been silent on this, as has virtually everyone else. Even Vance didn’t make it explicit that Lemire doctored, fabricated the quote. He called it a falsehood, but it’s worse than that – he fabricated, inserting a word and wrapping quotes around it.
Donald Trump, Jr. is the only person I’ve seen who noticed that Lemire lied, calling him a liar in this post.
Three days later, Lemire announced that he was leaving Politico, and signing a deal with MSNBC. He was presumably fired for his fraud, yet none of the news coverage of his move disclosed that he had committed fraud three days earlier. The Hill doesn’t mention it. It’s the strangest, most suppressed case of journalistic fraud I’ve ever seen. No one is talking about it. If things had continued like this, he’d get away with it. It’s truly remarkable that someone can commit fraud, literally fabricating a quote, and there’s no coverage or discussion of it at all. And there are no questions for MSNBC. After all, they employ a fraud.
Moreover, notice Lemire’s tactic of microquoting, common in leftist media. Often they’ll only quote a single word or three, and fill in the rest with paraphrasing. This obviously isn’t ethical journalism — it’s not possible to know what someone said when they do this. Lemire took a 30-word quote, and stripped it to three words plus his fabricated word.
(The New York Post has a good rundown of the sequence of events as leftist media scrambled to cover up Biden’s statement that night.)
“The transcript says…”
This story also illustrated a chilling behavior in leftist media. In story after story at Politico, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other leftist outlets, reporters cited only the White House transcript of Biden’s statement, as though we’d care about a transcript when we have the video.
Transcripts aren’t real. They’re just someone’s account of what someone said. We don’t need them if we can just hear or watch the person say it. Leftist media generally withheld the video and cited the WH transcript instead.
Predictably, the transcript was, like Politico’s story, doctored. Biden staffers added an apostrophe to “supporter’s”, trying to say that Biden was only referring to the comedian (who is never identified as a comedian by the WH or most media — always a “supporter”). The doctored version makes no sense since no object follows the possessive. Here’s the video (only 16 seconds):
If we’re to stay connected to reality, we cannot substitute Orwellian transcripts for it. The reality here is the video — no one’s transcripts matter, certainly not the White House’s. Leftist media is systematically trying to wedge itself between the public and reality, distorting it to advance leftist power. Citing doctored government transcripts while suppressing the video is a chilling example of how Orwellian and unethical American media has become.
Politico
Even if they fired Lemire, Politico remains a leftist outlet that publishes a high rate of false claims, what leftists call “misinformation”. They’re extremely unreliable, which is why Wikipedia asserts that they’re reliable — virtually all leftist media outlets, and zero non-leftist outlets1, are simply asserted as reliable by Wikipedia’s editors. (Wikipedia has no data to back their assertions, commissioned no systematic research.)
For example, Politico still reports the doctored WH quote with the apostrophe, uncorrected — Lemire published this article two hours after his original fraud, which was deleted.
Three days later, a different Politico employee reported the scandal of the WH doctoring the transcript, but Politico hasn’t corrected articles like Lemire’s that include the WH-doctored quote.
Note that Politico makes finding their original, false articles difficult by appending random 8-digit numbers to their URLs, creating lots of different URLs for the same article, which makes it hard for web archives to archive them. For example, the current version of Lemire’s story has a URL that ends with: …biden-sparks-garbage-firestorm-00186187.
A fresh example of a wildly false claim by Politico is in this story on Trump’s Executive Order banning federal funding of child mutilation and sterilization:
Gender-affirming care for minors and doctors’ ability to provide it has been widely accepted by major medical institutions, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, through independent reviews.
There are no independent reviews that find good evidence for benefits of “gender affirming care”, nor have these lobbies cited any. Zero. Not a single one. Every systematic review around the world has found poor or no evidence to support giving children sterilizing hormones, puberty blockers, or mutilating surgeries — in Britain, Finland, Sweden, and Canada that I know of.
None of the leftist doctors lobbies in America have conducted a systematic review (which wouldn’t be independent), though the American Academy of Pediatrics briefly suggested they would. No one in America has. There’s literally nothing. Moreover, these leftist doctors lobbies could not conduct such a review at this point — their ideological bias is too strong, their financial conflict of interest too obvious, and their legal liability looms as more children sue them. (To get a sense of the numbers of children harmed, see my snapshot report.)
So Politico’s claim is simply false. These leftist lobbies have not cited any independent reviews, and no such reviews exist that support sterilizing or mutilating children. I notified the author Daniel Payne this morning. I think the odds of a correction are low, since they only hire leftist activists and don’t generally correct false claims. Politico is littered with falsehoods like this — I found this one in seconds by searching “gender affirming care” and it was the first and only article I opened. We could find a dozen in ten minutes.
Fin
Jonathan Lemire is a fraud, and should not be employed in journalism. If MSNBC retains him, MSNBC should be properly characterized as a fraud-employing outlet, in addition to being extremely unreliable and mentally disordered. (Note that Wikipedia’s activists also assert that MSNBC is a Reliable Source (!) We simply must build an alternative, stat.)
Conservatives, libertarians, and high-integrity leftists have so far failed to commission the systematic research we need to establish the reliability of various media outlets, along with various forms of bias that don’t manifest as simple false claims. We need rigorous, comprehensive research that assesses false claim rates and multiple forms of bias at all major outlets. It’s unacceptable that we don’t have this data. As far as I know, no one is even attempting it.
With such data, all open and explorable online, we could properly characterize outlets like Politico, MSNBC, NYT, et al. Conservatives and Republicans in particular are being gashed daily by narratives that they “don’t believe in facts”, that Trump lies constantly and so on when the reality is more the opposite, and where these outlets are themselves extremely unreliable, to the point of fraud. There’s no need to just passively take it, and let milions and millions of Americans internalize these false narratives and walk around with countless false beliefs. I’m confident that any major conservative outlet is significantly more reliable than Politico, WaPo, etc — if that’s true, it matters, and it needs to be established with unimpeachable data and methods. Let’s going on this. Contact me below and we can get rolling in weeks.
Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.
Both of the outlets I cited that accurately reported Biden’s remarks — Fox News and the New York Post — are classified as Unreliable by Wikipedia. I’m willing to bet thousands of dollars that they’re more reliable than Politico, WaPo, NYT, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, or any other leftist outlet, using false claim rates as the measure, from systematic, complete-samples research like I summarized above. Note that the NY Post famously broke the Biden laptop story, with the emails documenting the inflence peddling. This seems to have had no impact on Wikipedia’s rating.