Joe Biden: accused and endorsed
Bernie Sanders endorses his former rival on a day when sexual harassment allegations against Joe Biden gain attention; Peter Doocy reports.
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet appeared to admit Monday that the controversial change in its report about the sexual-assault allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden was influenced by his presidential campaign.
The Times raised eyebrows on Sunday after it deleted a tweet and tweaked its report about the 1993 accusation made by former Biden staffer Tara Reade, which originally read, "No other allegation about sexual assault surfaced in the course of reporting, nor did any former Biden staff members corroborate any details of Ms. Reade's allegation. The Times found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden, beyond the hugs, kisses and touching that women previously said made them uncomfortable."
No correction or editor's note was made in the report but the Times later explained the deleted tweet, saying, "We've deleted a tweet in this thread that had some imprecise language that has been changed in the story."
On Monday, Times media columnist Ben Smith sat down with his boss to discuss the report and pressed him on several criticisms of the report, including the edit.
"I want to ask about some edits that were made after publication, the deletion of the second half of the sentence... Why did you do that?" Smith asked.
"Even though a lot of us, including me, had looked at it before the story went into the paper, I think that the campaign thought that the phrasing was awkward and made it look like there were other instances in which he had been accused of sexual misconduct, and that's not what the sentence was intended to say," Baquet responded.
"Why not explain that?" Smith followed.
"We didn't think it was a factual mistake," Baquet replied. "I thought it was an awkward phrasing issue that could be read different ways and that it wasn't something factual we were correcting. So, I didn't think that was necessary."
The Biden campaign did not immediately respond to Fox News' request for comment.
New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, left, spoke out about the paper's handling of sex-assault accusations against former Vice President Joe Biden.
Baquet defended the paper's delay in reporting on Reade's claims, which she made nearly three weeks before the Times published its report on Easter Sunday.
"I thought that what The New York Times could offer and should try to offer was the reporting to help people understand what to make of a fairly serious allegation against a guy who had been a vice president of the United States and was knocking on the door of being his party's nominee," Baquet explained. "Look, I get the argument. Just do a short, straightforward news story. But, I'm not sure that doing this sort of straightforward news story would have helped the reader understand. Have all the information he or she needs to think about what to make of this thing."
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He also addressed the comparison between the paper's treatments of allegations against Biden and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
"Kavanaugh was already in a public forum in a large way. Kavanaugh's status as a Supreme Court justice was in question because of a very serious allegation. And, when I say in a public way, I don't mean in the public way of Tara Reade's. If you ask the average person in America, they didn't know about the Tara Reade case," Baquet told Smith. "So I thought, in that case, if The New York Times was going to introduce this to readers, we needed to introduce it with some reporting and perspective. Kavanaugh was in a very different situation. It was a live, ongoing story that had become the biggest political story in the country. It was just a different news judgment moment."
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Reade initially stepped forward last year, when multiple women emerged claiming inappropriate touching by Biden. Reade, at the time, claimed Biden put his hands on her shoulders and rubbed his fingers up and down her neck, but was unable to gain traction on her story aside from an article in a local newspaper.
But, in late-March, Reade told a far more graphic account, with different and more serious details, raising the allegation to the level of sexual assault.
Reade's story first resurfaced in an article in The Intercept. Podcast host Katie Halper then interviewed Reade, who said that in 1993, a more senior member of Biden's staff asked her to bring the then-senator his gym bag near the Capitol building, which led to the encounter in question.
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"He greeted me, he remembered my name, and then we were alone. It was the strangest thing," Reade told Halper. "There was no like, exchange really. He just had me up against the wall."
Reade said she tried to share her story last year, but nobody listened to her. This past Thursday, she filed a criminal complaint against Biden with police in Washington, D.C.
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The Biden campaign vehemently denied Reade's allegation.
"Women have a right to tell their story, and reporters have an obligation to rigorously vet those claims. We encourage them to do so, because these accusations are false," Kate Bedingfield, the deputy campaign manager and communications director for the Biden campaign, said in a statement to Fox News.
Fox News' Brooke Singman contributed to this report.
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