During President Joe Biden’s press conference Thursday, a number of right-wing media personalities, ranging from Fox News contributors to fringe conspiracy theorists on the far right, asserted that Biden was reading from scripted answers, also implying that the assembled reporters may have collaborated with the administration for it.
Any person who actually watched the press conference would’ve seen Biden speaking off the cuff most of the time, especially on domestic issues, while sometimes looking down at prepared notes to cite statistics in those areas. And sometimes, in sensitive matters of international diplomacy and security, Biden appeared to read carefully worded statements on specific questions, while also adding additional comments on the wider scope of those foreign policy areas.
But those subtleties are being ignored by some people.
Fox News contributor Ari Fleischer, a former White House press secretary under President George W. Bush, claimed he’d never seen a president using prepared notes. (Of course, former President Donald Trump was often seen with prepared notes, to which he would add his own handwritten annotations.)