Posted on by Doug Santo

Don’t believe everything you see on CNN

Biden speaks to half-empty room at CNN town hall

“…President Biden on Wednesday spoke to a half-empty auditorium while doing a live CNN town hall event in Ohio.

The more than dozen empty rows weren’t apparent to television viewers thanks to flattering shots that appeared to show a full, non-distanced crowd packing the front rows — in a striking visual display of normalcy after more than a year of COVID-19 restrictions.

But members of the traveling White House press pool shared photos from the back of the room, revealing that, in fact, the venue was far from packed at Mount St. Joseph University in Cincinnati.

Bloomberg News reporter Jennifer Epstein, who traveled with Biden as a representative of wire services, tweeted an image of “[w]hat the Biden CNN town hall looks like from the back of the auditorium.”…”

President Biden seemed a little groggy.

Related:

Biden drifts off answering a question during CNN’s town hall with Don Lemon, appears to listen to earpiece to get out of incoherent ramble

“…Even with the friendliest, least demanding moderator imaginable, Don Lemon, it was a challenge for President Joe Biden to get through the entire hour. His handlers must have believed that with familiar questions and maybe a good earpiece helping him along, he could handle the challenge.

Asked an unchallenging question of 12-year-olds and vaccination, he drifted off in the middle of a sentence, and, as he so often does, looked down, got that Deliverance banjo player look on his face, and appeared to be listening to something in his earpiece, and then strung together a sequence of words that were not grammatically related to the rest of the sentence, but which, on their own, were coherent. As if repeating what he just heard…”

Doug Santo