New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Sunday slammed the Biden White House for pressuring ABC News to edit out President Joe Biden’s usage of the non-existent word “goodest” during his Friday interview with George Stephanopoulos and for pressuring her to edit her column that highlighted his usage of the word.
Dowd wrote on Sunday that, in her Saturday column, she had quoted Biden saying to Stephanopoulos: “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Dowd said she had done so after she and her researcher listened to the video ten times and checked the ABC News transcript, which showed that he said “goodest.”
She then said that, after the column was posted on Saturday morning, Biden campaign spokesman T.J. Ducklo emailed her to “flag” that ABC News had updated its transcript to change the word “goodest” to “good as,” so that the transcript read, “I’ll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the good as job as I know I can do, that’s what this is about.”
Dowd said Ducklo asked her if she could “tweak” her column and change the word “goodest” to make it “consistent with the corrected transcript” even though, she wrote, “[T]he revised version was also gobbledygook.”
She said Ducklo got combative when she did not immediately agree, writing to her, “I think it would be quite unusual if the Times asserted the president said something that the news organization who conducted the interview says he didn’t say …”
Ducklo claimed that ABC News had made the decision on its own, even adding, “Surely you are not suggesting otherwise.”
Ducklo wrote her, “Had another convo on this. ABC News received the tape and confirmed the error to us. Then made the correction.”
Dowd said she was “more confused than ever.”
“What tape? From whom?? Why the runaround??? Given the White House’s egregious coverup about Biden’s sag from aging, the spokesman’s coyness seemed de trop,” she wrote.
She then said that, by Saturday night, the Times’s Michael Shear and Michael Grynbaum had a story that revealed the White House had been the one who “asked ABC News to check” whether Biden had said “goodest” or “good as,” claiming there was a discrepancy between what it recorded and what the ABC News transcript said.
Dowd said the Times then “attached notes” on her column and all stories that had used the word “goodest.”
Her Saturday morning column now has a note that reads:
Times Opinion revised Mr. Biden’s quote in this column about how he would feel if he loses the election after White House officials and several news organizations contacted ABC on Friday about whether Mr. Biden had said “goodest” or “good as.” ABC’s standards team listened again to the audio and made the change. Mr. Biden’s actual words at that point in the interview were difficult to make out and open to interpretation.
Dowd wrote, “[W]hatever the president meant, his answer to that question went over like a lead balloon.”
“No one cares if he feels good about himself in a losing cause,” she wrote.
“It might seem like much ado about goodest. But it’s a harbinger of tense times between a White House in bunker mode and a press corps in ferret mode. Maybe the White House should think about closed captioning,” she quipped.
This was not Dowd’s first clash with Biden.
She famously was one of the people who outed Biden in 1987 for plagiarizing Neil Kinnock, a British politician, when he was running for president in 1988.
Dowd recalled that plagiarism in a June 29 op-ed, in which she blasted Biden for putting himself ahead of the country:
I knocked him out of that race when I wrote about how he cloaked himself in the life of Neil Kinnock, the British Labour leader who was a soaring speaker, and how he gave speeches that borrowed, probably unwittingly, from Robert F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey.
In that op-ed, she opined that he had started his presidency “too late.”
“He has clearly been declining for the last couple of years — a dangerous development in a volatile world, with A.I. revolutionizing our country and with a Supreme Court full of religious fanatics reshaping American life,” she wrote, citing a column she wrote in 2022 advising against a run.
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