{"id":9603,"date":"2025-05-24T15:04:05","date_gmt":"2025-05-24T15:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/the-biden-ads-that-never-ran\/"},"modified":"2025-05-24T15:04:05","modified_gmt":"2025-05-24T15:04:05","slug":"the-biden-ads-that-never-ran","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/the-biden-ads-that-never-ran\/","title":{"rendered":"The Biden ads that never ran"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

After a blitzkrieg of a book rollout that saw Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson\u2019s \u201cOriginal Sin\u201d<\/a> dominate the news cycle this week with its clinical autopsy of Joe Biden\u2019s decision to run for reelection, some in Biden world are hitting back, offering fresh complaints about the reporting process and their own fact checks.<\/p>\n

When Biden\u2019s reelection campaign needed video of him taking off-the-cuff questions from voters, they turned to a staged town hall in Delaware in April 2024 that they planned to use for a campaign commercial \u2014 an episode that went so poorly, people in the campaign determined the town hall yielded unusable material, according to Tapper and Thompson.<\/p>\n

The pair write that at the closed-press event, even amid supporters and campaign staff that had the full list of questions, \u201cBiden had trouble. The campaign ultimately decided that the footage wasn\u2019t usable.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Biden team\u2019s is pushing back. Three versions of test ads obtained exclusively by Blue Light News tell a slightly more complicated story.<\/p>\n

While all three are highly edited and feature jump cuts of Biden\u2019s remarks, the footage also shows the candidate engaging with members of the audience. Blue Light News viewed dated documents related to the town hall\u2019s planning and a painting in the gym to confirm the date and location.<\/p>\n

One is called \u201cGreatest Nation\u201d<\/a> focusing on democracy; another is titled \u201cThey\u2019ve Tried\u201d<\/a> on the Affordable Care Act; a third, directed at veterans, is called \u201cDefend Us All.\u201d<\/a> <\/p>\n

None ever aired.<\/p>\n

Why was that? Though Tapper and Thompson report that it was because the footage \u201cwasn\u2019t usable,\u201d Biden advisers argue that the footage didn\u2019t make it on air simply because of timing. <\/p>\n

A Biden spokesperson tells Blue Light News that the campaign tested the ads with focus groups but did not deploy them before the president dropped out of the race following his disastrous June 2024 debate.<\/p>\n

Asked about the Biden advisers\u2019 claims, Tapper disputed the contention. In a quotation supplied to Blue Light News by Tapper, an unnamed Biden adviser said: \u201cWhile the campaign was able to selectively utilize portions of the footage to craft ads that were eventually tested on focus groups, the consensus from senior and mid level campaign staff present for the event and those privy to the editing process was that the footage was not up to par and would require crafty editorial support. The campaign\u2019s leadership would not have needed to wait nearly four months to (not) release the ads created with the footage if it reflected the picture of confidence they suggest.\u201d <\/p>\n

Blue Light News has been unable to independently verify the identity of the unnamed Biden adviser supplied by Tapper.<\/p>\n

The dispute over the book\u2019s reporting is the latest pushback from Biden aides and allies against what they are keen to depict as a slapdash fact-checking process by Tapper and Thompson. <\/p>\n

Tapper and Thompson have made a point<\/a> of publicly noting that they paid for their book to be fact-checked \u2014 a step that many nonfiction books skip \u2014 and that Fergus McIntosh, the head research editor at The New Yorker, led that process. <\/p>\n

The New Yorker has a stringent and storied process for vetting materials before publication, and, indeed, McIntosh fact-checked both the book and the excerpt from the book<\/a> that the magazine published last week. Blue Light News has learned that McIntosh told at least one person that he was more limited in the facts he could check in the book versus the excerpt, which is common. McIntosh declined to speak on the record. <\/p>\n

McIntosh\u2019s role in fact-checking was raised as an issue in a statement Biden\u2019s spokesperson gave The New Yorker, but which the magazine didn\u2019t publish in its entirety. \u201c[T]he New Yorker employee who reached out to fact-check this excerpt also apparently reviewed the book and offered suggestions to the authors as they wrote it,\u201d the statement read. \u201cIt’s remarkable that neither this fact checker, nor the authors, reached out to fact check the actual book with us, and only the New Yorker is holding them to the high editorial standards that readers of the book should get in the first place.\u201d <\/p>\n

In other words, the unnamed Biden spokesperson claims that the first time a Biden aide heard from the independently hired fact-checker was for the magazine excerpt, not for the book. The New Yorker did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

Rufus Gifford, a Biden campaign official, shared video of Biden talking with George Clooney at a moment that the president allegedly did not recognize him \u2014 though the video doesn\u2019t seem to definitively prove Gifford\u2019s argument<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like some of the book\u2019s buzziest anecdotes \u2014 including that Biden didn\u2019t recognize Clooney \u2014 the town hall anecdote is a matter of perception. <\/p>\n

Thompson reports that some people say ads from the town hall weren\u2019t used because the lighting was bad<\/a>; the lighting looks serviceable in the ads. Others told Thompson that Biden\u2019s performance at the event was poor; Biden, indeed, sounds raspy and old.<\/p>\n

In a statement to Blue Light News, a spokesperson for Tapper and Thompson said: \u201cJake and Alex stand by their reporting in \u2018Original Sin.\u2019 The Biden team is repeating the same obfuscatory tactics used during their time in the White House, and news outlets continuing to rely on the very same unattributed and unverified voices raises serious credibility questions.\u201d <\/p>\n

The spokesperson didn\u2019t want to be named. Tapper declined to identify his source who appraised the Biden town hall.<\/p>\n

This story <\/i>first appeared in Blue Light News Playbook<\/i><\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After a blitzkrieg of a book rollout that saw Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson\u2019s \u201cOriginal Sin\u201d dominate the news cycle this week with its clinical autopsy of Joe Biden\u2019s decision to run for reelection, some in Biden world are hitting back, offering fresh complaints about the reporting process and their own fact checks. When Biden\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}