Biden’s 2022 comment about having cancer is going viral again. Here’s what he actually meant.
On May 18, former President Joe Biden’s staff announced he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer. In response, several social media users began circulating a three-year-old video clip of Biden as evidence that he knew about his diagnosis years before.
“WOW: Joe Biden said literally over TWO YEARS AGO that he had cancer. The Biden regime at the time called it a ‘gaffe.’ Have they been covering this up for YEARS?” one user posted May 18 on X.
Other prominent conservative commentators including Donald Trump Jr. shared similar posts about the 2022 speech and a cover-up. Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis overlaps with the release of the book “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, about how Biden’s inner circle worked to conceal signs of decline.
Related Knowledge Center: Democracy and politics
News organizations are scrambling to find a coverage approach that adequately informs the American public about the country’s slide from democracy to authoritarian rule.
Related Knowledge Center: Fact-checking and its detractors
Fact-checking has become a familiar tool for political reporters to hold office-holders and candidates accountable. But critics ask if fact-checkers sometimes miss the forest for the trees, and if the practice often struggles with false equivalency the way conventional political coverage does.